Heather Moffitt describes in the Faith & Leadership blog of Duke Divinity School how taking her son with special needs to Sunday services taught her how to be broken in church.
When I became a mother, I didn’t expect my children automatically to exhibit angelic behavior in church. But I did expect them to learn how to comport themselves. I wanted them to worship with the people of God and learn the Bible stories that had shaped me. They would discover which deacons kept peppermints and butterscotch candies for the children. They would learn that they were a valuable part of the congregation.
Reality doesn’t always conform to expectation. We joined a new church when my son was 14 months old. Just weeks later, he began to exhibit debilitating behavioral challenges. His outbursts were often violent and usually unpredictable, making it difficult to take him anywhere, much less church. I spent most of the time in our new members Sunday school class pacing the halls with him.
In the years that followed, he was diagnosed with an alphabet soup of conditions: ADHD, ODD, ASD and more. (The question of diagnosis is a worthy topic for another time.) I dreaded Sunday mornings. We’d pull into the parking lot of the church and I would be in a state of prayer — praying we could get through an entire service before we would have to leave, praying he wouldn’t have an epic tantrum in the pews, praying he wouldn’t attack other children, and praying that people would be nice to us.