The power of unconditional love

When a reporter asked billionaire Warren Buffett this week what he thought was the best advice he had ever received, he said it came from his father, who taught him how to l ive. He explained that all parents can make "a better human being" as follows:

"The power of unconditional love. I mean, there is no power on earth like unconditional love. And I think that if you offered that to your child, I mean, you're 90 percent of the way home. There may be days when you don't feel like it- it's not uncritical love; that's a different animal- but to know you can always come back, that is huge in life. That takes you a long, long way. And I would say that every parent out there that can extend that to their child at an early age, it's going to make for a better human being."

I realize that the advice of a billionaire is not exactly like gospel, but it sure is gratifying when the advice of a human so neatly segues with the example set before us in the Bible. I think of the Apostle Paul speaking about no power on earth or in hell being able to separate us from the love of God, and Christ's disciple John saying that those who love are born of God and know God, for God is love. The only thing that used to comfort me during hard times was this sustaining belief, that somehow, in spite of my insignificance to other human beings, after all of the meanness and cruelty I may have suffered at the hands of men, yet my God loved me always, and would one day take me home to live with Him. And the key to all of that was living my life as my Lord would have me live, and not be swayed or dismayed by the flesh and the devils that attacked me. It took many years to find my way to this particular truth, because I always deemed myself unlovable because of the way my parents treated me and my siblings. But many years later, I can even learn to love and forgive even them, no matter the damage they did to us.

I finally learned about unconditional love through my children, more through them than anyone else, because they needed me. By loving them without being critical, loving them each just as they were without demanding obedience to my will first in order to gain my love, this made all of the difference. Conditional love was all I had ever known from earthly family, I had to "earn" every bit of affection I ever got, and it was rare that I was ever praised any way. More often than not, I and my siblings were brutalized, mocked and shamed, sometimes for no reason at all, except that we were there for that purpose, I guess. We had no rights, no recourse and no advocate; we were at the mercy of a type of madness, I think. I guess I'll never fully understand, but I must let it go and forgive.

As a result, I tried to be for my children all that my own parents had failed to be for me. So it goes that today I was deeply gratified to find that my instinctive belief in loving my children the way I believe God loves me is validated in the life of another human being, even a rich and famous one like Buffett. We are all of us only human, after all.

"Love one another as I have loved you," Christ said, and so I shall always endeavor to do, not only showing unconditional love for my children and my husband, but for all of humanity and for this beautiful earth, our home.

Lesley of the Lion's Heart

Lesley is my only daughter and was born premature, low birth weight (about 2 pounds), the first of the twins (her brother was born 30 minutes later) and both have a form of autism known as Asperger's Syndrome.

She is 16 years old now and the bravest soul I have ever met.

Lesley attends the local high school but will never get a regular diploma because she cannot do high school math. She will receive a life preparation diploma, I think, after she does her 12 years but her dreams, her hopes of a future life, extend far beyond the limits of our small Southern city.

Lesley wants to travel the world, beginning with the United States. She researches various areas of the country and reports all of the attractions and features to me, puts photos of different places on her computer desk top and asks me what I think of them. She talks of sailing around the world in a one-person sail boat (with a small motor in case of dead calms) and she wants to live alone, with perhaps a friendly dog for company.

Lesley also has a knack for writing. She has written several long stories of at least 12 chapters about the adventures of various brave animals or people from another dimension. Lesley loves the characters of Severus Snape and Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series, as well as Strider (Aragorn) in "Lord of the Rings." Not having grown up with a father (I divorced him many years ago for his cruelty and lack of support) she instead created an idealized one for herself out of parts of these heroic figures. Her only friends are the ones she makes up inside her head. She is lonely and cries about not having real-life friends, but I tell her to find friends, you must first be a friend, so we are working on her "people" skills, how to make eye contact and smile and say "hello" appropriately.

Lesley also has a penchant for science, both biological and chemical, and would like to bring alchemy back to the realm of viable scientific research if possible (I tell her it is not but, oh well.) Bottom line, her imagination is great and flexible and expands her world much farther than her actual education will allow.

My quest is to help enable Lesley to reach some of those distant stars to which her imagination and interests incline. I cannot bring fictional characters to life but I can show her how to create some of her own and perhaps turn it into real stories that can be read by others (currently, all versions get shredded before I can read them.)

Or perhaps I can help her get the GED and continue her education in some real scientific field, like animal science or botany. Whatever I can do to help her, she deserves the very best I can offer so she can one day do her best on her own.

Robert Browning once wrote, " A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" Subsititute "girl's" for "man's" and there is my little Lesley, my only daughter and always my little girl. May God give me the strength and wisdom to help my daughter reach whatever heaven she desires. No one deserves it more.

Coping with Asperger's in SW Georgia

My twins were born 16 years ago, just before I turned 40. Both babies were premature, and of low birth weight (I could hold my 2 pound daughter in the palm of my hand.) They stayed in the hospital one week after birth to enable their lungs to develop a bit more, and then I took them home. Both qualified for WIC as I was the only parent working to support them. I divorced their father before they turned three due to his violent behavior which threatened both me and the twins.
Both children exhibited developmental delays very early on, especially my daughter, who easily qualified for SSI by the time she was four due to speech problems. However, my son, her twin, did not qualify although his behavior was far more uncontrollable. The SSI psychiatrist (the one who worked for Social Security) misdiagnosed him as having juvenile bi-polar disorder (an almost unheard-of diagnosis). I had to pay for his medicines out-of-pocket for several years, as SSI does not cover bi-polar disorder.
Frustrated, I finally, I took him to a juvenile psychiatric specialist in Thomasville who correctly identified my son’s disorder as Asperger’s Syndrome, a high-functioning type of autism and she asked to see his twin. The minute my daughter walked into the office, the doctor said she exhibited even more symptoms of Asperger’s than my son did. Both children qualified for SSI after that.
Being qualified to receive SSI insurance and payments however, does not guarantee delivery of services to treat the disorder. Here in South Georgia, both twins were placed in special education courses, but because my son’s behavior was more violent and disruptive, he was placed in a separate classroom with behavior disordered children and was exposed to even more violent behaviors than even his disorder warranted. When he could no longer be contained in this classroom, he was moved to another school in the same area before being permanently moved to a school for behavior disordered children in a neighboring county. He was contained there for two and a half years and was supposed to be receiving home visits from “specialists” … we went through four such specialists who visited my son twice each in our home and never returned.
All the while that I was trying to get someone to educate my son- with poor to non-existent results – he was seeing a psychiatrist at the local government health clinic whose solution to my son’s behavior problems was to give him increasingly powerful anti-psychotic medications, some of which had fatal side effects if not monitored closely. When I realized, after about four years of these visits, (where I was not even allowed to ask the doctor questions, had even been told that he “did not have time to listen” to my concerns) I summarily removed my son from all medications as I feared they were doing more harm than good.
Over the last three years, since I removed my son from medications, he went through puberty and twice I involved local public safety to remove him from my home due to the nature of his threats … but I will never do so again as both times he was locked up in an institution in mid-Georgia where both times he was brutalized (beaten only, thank God) by more powerful and disturbed teenagers than himself. I have since kept my son home and he receives no schooling at all, but I cut a deal with the local Juvenile judge to home school my son and at least his is not in a public school system where he could hurt someone else.
I still have hopes that my son – who is now six feet two inches tall and weighs 250 pounds-, will outgrow some of his behaviors and indeed I can see where some progress has been made. But his whole world revolves around a 10 foot by 10 foot square bedroom where he has his computer, a TV and his video games. There is no contact with other children, he has no “off-line” friends and his education stopped more than a year ago when he flatly refused to do any of the assignments I gave him.
Still, I do not want m y son at the mercy of the “system” … I do not want his civil rights violated and I do not want him hurt. I feel I am doing my best to protect him from others and from himself, and I hope that one day I can find a place where he can go to day school, earn his GED and come home to me at night, perhaps learn to drive a car and get a little job to make some spending money.
My daughter is in high school now, but will never graduate as she cannot do math. I hope to get her into GED classes so she can get her driver’s license and perhaps get a job, as well. She has big dreams of moving out on her own and making enough money to travel but I will be glad if she can just get a local job and come home to me every day where I know she will be safe. She is far too trusting and I am afraid someone will hurt her or take advantage of her, although her social skills are a good bit better than her brother’s.
I know I will have to take care of my twins in some capacity for the rest of their lives, but sometimes it gets hard trying to be everything to them. I have had no help from the local school system for Dale, for sure, and there are no programs in this area of the state for children with autism. (The closest “school” is in Atlanta and yes, I could probably apply and let him go there, but he would be so far away I would not be able to see him or make sure he is OK.)
My next step will be to apply for help from the Vocational Rehab center in hopes that I can get some job training for the twins after they get GEDs, and maybe the center can help place them in jobs, as well. I only hope it will improve their quality of life and give them opportunities that the public education and health systems here never did.

More Snippets of Truth

Here are a few more snippets of truth to nourish the burgeoning skeptic within me:

"It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it." - Edwin Way Teale (1889-1980), Circle Of The Seasons, 1953

"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck." - Thomas Jefferson

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." - 1 Thessalonians 5:21

"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man" - Bertrand Russell

"Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." - T. H. Huxley

“Faith, as well-intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction- faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.” Thomas A. Edison

“Let us accept truth, even when it alters us and changes our views.” George Eliot

"While spiritual insight or faith is one valid measure in spiritual matters, true spiritual insight never directly contradicts valid intellectual insight or facts in the physical world. Faith may go beyond reason, but does not go against it. It never blatantly contradicts the facts which we perceive with our God-given common sense. Faith and fact point in a single direction. When they do not, something is seriously wrong…A willingness to accept facts as they exist, and to learn to use them to test the views one holds rather than falling back on subjective experience or rationalizations, is the first step towards discovering genuine truth." (Charles Larson, By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus, pp. 177-178)

"A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows." - Mark Twain

"I am surer that my rational nature is from God, than that any book is an expression of his will." - William Ellery Channing

"Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth." - Ludwig Borne

"There's a difference between faith in an area where the evidence is lacking, and denial in an area where the evidence is copious but against you." -Baura

Link to an article from The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry site, Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die.

The Reward of Patience

The reward of patience is patience. (St. Francis of Assissi)

The first time I read that, it didn't make sense to me, but after some thought, I realized that having patience can be a very great gift and goes a long way in preserving one's sanity and hope.

Benjamin Franklin once said that "he (or she) who can have patience can have what he (she) will." It is true that we do not always get what we want in life but if we can be patient and continue to hope, sometimes good things really do come to those who wait.

Remember the character Tom Hanks played in "Castaway." He nearly gave up, even tried to kill himself after being stranded all alone on a desert island, sole survivor of a plane crash in the Pacific. But when the branch on which he was going to hang himself fell into the ocean below after he tried to test a weight on it, he resigned himself to life and, lo and behold, one day the tide brought a piece of vinyl, part of the plane that crashed, which he used as a sail on his log raft to get him over the reef and out into the open ocean where he was eventually found by a passing freighter. Don't give up hope because you never know what the tide will bring in, or, in other words, one day the tide will turn in your favor, or your ship will come in, or, like the man on the island, even a piece of wreckage from your past may turn out to be the very thing that saves you.

Samuel Johnson once said, "That which is formed for long duration arrives slowly to its maturity." Some things take a long time to develop or they may take a lot of self-preparation in order for us to be ready for the good things ahead ("I will study and prepare myself, and the opportunity will come" Abraham Lincoln, or "There are no shortcuts to any place worth going," said Beverly Sills.)

I realized I was making the same mistakes over and over again. The problem was not outside of me, but within me, so I decided to change the whole pattern of my existence. I still had my twins to raise and I had to work to take care of them and our house, but I also determined that I had to better myself. I attended college on grants and student loans, and finally got a decent, honorable job as a writer and then as a county employee. Best of all, I prepared myself for a special man by living a quiet and virtuous life alone with my children. I learned who I was and of what things I was capable, and I learned self-control and patience. I now have a good and kind man who loves me, who found me again after being apart from me for 37 years.

It is true good things come to those who wait, but also to those who are patient and pray for such blessings. Thank-you, God and Philip, for all the joy now in my life.