This is one of my old posts from FatTriplets.com.

I’ve had too much going on to write anything substantive lately, including responding to some good questions that have been posed to me in the comments. So today I am taking the lazy way. I wrote this on my sons 15th birthday. He will be 18 this year in October.

Scott

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I like to say that it took me a long time to “repent” of going to seminary. Maybe longer. What I mean by that is it took that long for God to begin to break me of the intellectual pride that accompanied the knowledge I gained.

But he He did begin that process 15 years ago today. I was in my final year of a “reformed” and presbyterian seminary in California. I was supporting the family by working as a waiter at a golf club when I wasn’t studying. My wife was pregnant with our first child.

That evening, a few weeks before my wife’s due date, I was working a party at the golf club, pouring champagne for a hole-in-one. When she called me to come home, she confirmed that she was really in labor (she had had some contractions in the day, but we weren’t sure if they were the real thing or not, so I had gone on to work). I went home, picked her up and drove her to the hospital, a 35 minute drive South toward San Diego.

I won’t give the details about the labor and delivery except to say that after many hours of labor, after a forceps delivery, my eldest son was born October 27, 1990 in the wee hours of the morning. I asked about his APGAR score and was surprised that it wasn’t perfect. He looked perfect to me (except for the marks the tongs made on his head). He WAS perfect. Karen got settled in a room, she nursed the baby (or tried to), sent him to the nursery and went to sleep. I went home.

Karen called me early the next morning and encouraged me to come on to the hospital, they hadn’t brought her the baby yet. When I arrived in her room, I took one look at her face and knew there was something wrong. She looked ready to cry.

“Whats wrong?”
“The prediatrician just left. Our baby is in NICU, they told me that he appears to have a chromosal abnormality like Down Syndrome. They are checking him for a heart defect right now”.

We both cried. We held each other. We cried some more. The hospital counselor came to visit us. She gave us her card, told us there are resources available to help us, support groups, therapeutic services, etc. I know her lips were moving, but we didn’t hear.

On this day in 1990, I had been a believer in that particular form of theology known as “Calvinism” for probably 5 years. In seminary, I had taken a lot of systematic theology and church history courses where I studied the minutiae of the finest points of theology and theological disputes. I had learned Greek and Hebrew, higher criticism and hermeneutics. I made arguments on the fine points of the infralapsarian versus supralapsarian debate. I was a theological badass.

On that day, on that morning, none of that mattered. All that mattered, all I knew, all I felt was that something had been taken away from me. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We developed expectations
and jumped to conclusions about our future life. We shouldn’t have more children. He would never play sports. We’d never have deep theological conversations with our son. Its like suddenly everything you know and expect from your life gets turned totally on its head. My heart was broken.

I took my little pocket NIV and went to the restroom (still one of my favorite places to read) and turned to Psalm 139. I read

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, [a] you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,

even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”

even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

There in that small darkened toilet stall, I began to weep once again. But something was different. My tears were tears of joy. God reminded me that He is Soverereign. That doctrine that I had affirmed and argued about and been tested on sank down and penetrated my broken heart and healed it. He used the same Psalm to remind my wife of the truth as well. Within a few hours of our news, He turned our mourning into joy.

The counselor came back. We were smiling, happy, content, joyful. She thought we were crazy. I told her about our Sovereiegn redemptive healing God and that we were OK. She said most people mourn for months. I told here we were OK. Really. There’s no mistakes here. A few days later we were sitting with the geneticist to go over the results off the Chromosomal test (called a karyotype). She told us about sticky Chromosomes and how we don’t know why it happens. She told us our son was an “accident”. When she said that my wife and I glanced at each other and read each others minds and smiled.

I believed then and believe even more now that God is the God of hurricanes and sticky chromosomes. It still took me a long time to get over my seminary education, but one thing I took away, the most important lesson I learned, is that all theology is practical and if it isn’t practical, then it doesn’t really matter. Let the scholastics and the academics debate the “order of decrees” and the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. I’ll just hug my son. And wish him a happy birthday.

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P.S. We had more children. He plays sports. He discusses theology and God with childlike profundity and simplicity.