In the last part of podcast episode 83, Dr. Stephanie C. Holmes made the point that the world needs all kinds of brains: all kinds of inventors, statesman, politicians, etc, and that a lot of people who have done really big things had neurodiversive brains. We pick up the conversation there…
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Catherine Boyle: I remember—my husband and I went to Italy 10 years ago for an anniversary and if you haven't ever been, Michelangelo is officially my favorite artist of all time. And his work was just—I mean, it just boggles the mind that he could produce so much in a relatively short lifespan. But he was notoriously known for being a grumpy person, and it just makes me wonder if he was on the spectrum, if he had bipolar disorder, if he had something else going on that created this incredible gifting, but also made him not so great with other people.
Stephanie Holmes: I think that's true. I heard a lecture on this, and it really resonated that in the past, while we may have not have known about autism and Asperger's for higher functioning people, our society valued different things 100 plus years ago. If you were an inventor and you were intelligent, it didn't matter if you were quirky or what your personality was—if you were producing and giving something to society, if you're a little quirky doing it. I mean, look at Albert Einstein, right? I mean, he's got some quirky looking hair, right? But we drifted into this social era that your image—how you look, how you talk, what you own, what your job is—it's made it more difficult for neurodiverse people, because we shifted so much from what was a strength and a value set. Now we value all these other things in our society. I mean, you can be shallow and mean and produce nothing, but if you've got 1000 followers or a million followers or whatever on your social media, you're really important—even though you're not really contributing much to society. But we value that more. It’s kind of an unfair shift that puts those with differences in a negative light, when I think before there probably was more value there…
CB: Yes, I totally agree with that. And you never would have noticed in that culture, because everybody was working hard at whatever they were gifted with, and didn't have time to…
SH: …notice aloof quirky inventors. We were watching this show about all the early inventors, and definitely the guy who invented the toaster—he had to be on the spectrum—he was going to the cafe, and they couldn't make his toast even on both sides. But whatever they had was a one sided toaster. So he went home one day and decided he is going to make the perfectly toasted piece of bread! And he locks himself essentially down in his basement, and his granddaughter or great-granddaughter telling the story is like, Yeah, he ignored the family. No one saw him. He'd go come home from work, go down and then he makes the toaster, and doesn't keep it for himself. He takes one to the cafe, and he's like here: now make my toast correct!
CB: That definitely sounds like he's on the spectrum! Because he’s genius at creating, but doesn't know how to capitalize on it. That's really priceless.
Well, we talked a little bit already about the really incredible challenges to your faith when you go through something like what your family went through—which is not an uncommon experience. Now we're years after the fact. Thank the Lord for getting us through hard times. So how have you grown as a Christian, as a person, in your relationship with Christ? Because you've been privileged to be a parent of a child who has a hidden disability, and then also has a spouse who has a hidden disability?
SH: Yes, I think growing up as a child, I struggled with the story of the pools of Bethesda—when Jesus went and healed the one man who'd been a paralytic for 28 or 38 years. I'm thinking in my mind, as a kid, there's this pool—and the little flannel graphs, you have all these people with disabilities that are sitting and laying around—and Jesus healing this one person standing amongst all these other people with disabilities. As a child, I thought that was so mean. I was like, at least Oprah would be like “you get a healing, you too!” What is going on here? And that (my understanding of healing just one person) I didn't get that resolved until a couple of years ago when I went to Israel. I was really seeking the Lord: I don't really understand. I'm a person that believes in healing; how do You choose? Sometimes, you know, I don't understand the method to Your madness.
But you'll never know this unless you go to Israel. The pool of Bethesda, first, was a gentile pagan pool. It was not a ritual pool. But above it was this—I say it wrong—Asclepius (healing center of the Greek God Asclepius). It was like a Greek place where you would come for all the hocus pocus kind of stuff. And when you hear that little piece in the Bible, about how the waters would stir, what was happening was this place above the waters would run down into the pool. That's what would make it stir.
So for people who are coming from all over the ancient world to get snake bit or whatever crazy thing they were doing up in the pagan world—which was medicine at the time—they thought just getting a little bit of that water into their pools, that's what would cause the miracle, for them to get healed. So they try to jump in, and try to get in when the water comes in the pool. All it really was was the runoff from the above wall.
And the Holy Spirit just spoke to me and said, if Jesus–if everyone would have been healed that day, people would not have given credit to Jesus first of all; they would have given credit to the pagan god of the water that flowed down, right? And Jesus, when He came down, his primary role was to save us, to reconcile us to God, right? And the world of disability and differences—disability and differences are going to be part of our world forever. It would have done no good to heal everyone that He walked around, because there's still going to be disability in the world. It’s better—we need to learn how to embrace and minister and make (people with disabilities) a part of society, versus sticking people over here—here's your pool and here's your place. We'll come visit you when we want to see you. But the importance of integration, how Jesus saw him. And Jesus did heal that one, but also there's the lessons on how we treat people who are different, how we as a society need to treat those who are marginalized.
And that spoke to me that day in Israel, because I had carried this chip on my shoulder a little bit with God. It just really feels like you’ve just got to be in the know or something…
CB: …to get that special healing!
SH: Yes, like how do you get that? I'm of the charismatic bent. In my church, I always grew up and believed in healing. So in my 20’s, when my daughter was diagnosed, I was kind of in a faith crisis. I came out of the faith crisis and really examined who God is. And I said, Okay God, I don't really know what you're doing, but I trust You, because You know more than I do. And then I was kind of in the space where we're at now: how much God loves us all equal, those who are marginalized, those who are in the majority, and how much we as people of faith and in the church should be serving the marginalized. Not just because—I mean, it wasn't even in my periphery until it came to me and came to my house. I don't know that I would be saying and doing these things right now, except the Lord spoke to me and said, Instead of being angry that there were no resources for you, why don't you be the resource? Why don't you do that? At first, I said no! I ran away for three years and did something else. And then I said, Okay, I think I'll join and partner with you God, and I think I understand now the bigger picture of all of this. You didn't do this to me, you didn't make this happen to my family; you knew this would happen to my family. And you preparing me for the next ministry. And that's a huge mindset shift of God did this to me versus God just didn't prevent this from happening; He let the laws of nature and genetics do what they were going to do, and then is with you. I think the bigger miracle now than being healed is living with your disability and difference, and being able to praise God and be the person you're called to be, not just like an overcoming mindset, but despite the fact that there's not a healing—despite the fact there's still a difference, what God wants to do in your life anyway.
People are watching you when you're going through this as a family. I think that speaks more. I don't even think the world recognizes healings much anymore. Oh, that was science, that was medicine, you must have had that in the first place. But if you go through and suffer well and you still praise the Lord in your difficult circumstances, I think that's more miraculous in this world.
CB: Yes, I totally agree. And you see a lot of people in the disability community recognize that—if they have kind of a—charismatic isn't the right word, but more of a fundamentalist, conservative kind of interpretation of scripture—that people with disabilities—in Luke 14, there are two stories about people getting invited to the banquet of the king. And they're the last people invited. So all these however many years people have been on the planet, Jesus did not heal everybody who could have been healed at the time He was on the earth. He specifically said that the poor would always be with you.
Job was arguably the oldest book written, right after the first part of Genesis, which I think is pretty telling, that God wanted us to know that suffering was a pretty significant part of the human experience, and you’ve got a choice when you have suffering. Do you trust Him, or do you turn your back on Him? And God can do just amazing things when we realize that our challenges aren't going to go away. And so what does Christ want us to do with Him by our side through those challenges, which is exactly what you have done with the ministry that God has given you. It's something that is so needed, and I would argue that a whole lot of the disability ministry that we see in our culture, which is relatively recent—and most of the people that we interact with have only been at this for the last 20 to 25 or 30 years—it's because Christ is showing people little by little that they do have a very important purpose and role in guiding and helping the church understand the value of every person, whether they have an ability or a disability.
I'm loving this conversation, but I want to be mindful of your time. So if listeners have just received that diagnosis for their child, or they're listening to this and they're like, Oh my goodness, this sounds like somebody I love, whether it's their child, their spouse, parent or sibling—what are one or two things that you recommend that they do, not only to help that other person, but to take care of their own needs? Because it (diagnosis) can be the start of a mental health crisis for families who are starting to go down this journey. So just one or two things that you would recommend for people to do to take good care of themselves.
SH: First of all, not to be alone and isolate. The tagline of my book and the tagline of my podcast—the tagline of everything I do is you're not alone on your journey. So a protective factor for your mental and spiritual health is to not be alone, and to find a group. Because we're 20 years out from my daughter's diagnosis; there are parent support groups, there are autism societies. If your church doesn't have a ministry, maybe a bigger church does. I think first of all, you know self-care; you can't give what you don't have. Self-care isn’t selfish. On this journey, you need support; you need your community, and you might need to go looking for it. Don't expect it just to fall into your lap.
CB: It won't fall into your lap!
SH: Second, community, because you need that around you, because most of us don't live near extended family anymore, so you need a community. And then find the resources that are helpful to you. Start now: read, a podcast. There's so many podcasts now, like this one. With podcasts, you can listen to it in your car, you can be educated everywhere you're going. And then do one small thing at a time, just do one small step next.
If it's huge and it's ginormous and it's overwhelming, just pick one thing and do that, and then just pick the next thing and do that. And then you'll see that you're moving forward in that journey.
CB: And Jesus is very tender when we have those moments where we are really at our bottom. I would encourage people to also look for ways that He is speaking to you through His Word, and the interesting things that happen in your life that are connected to what you're going through—He often is very personal and present that way.
So you have a new book that is out now, and it was not only written by you, but every member of your family contributed, which is really a pretty cool thing! So talk a little bit about that, how it can be helpful to families who might be listening and recognizing that they have some of these same challenges.
SH: So the Lord put this on our heart earlier this year. My oldest daughter was turning 25 this year, and she was like, You know, Mom, you've told a lot of my story through your lens and through your eyes, and I'd really like to collaborate with you. So we originally thought the book was going to be a mother-daughter thing. I'm kind of the historian, but then she talks about the impact of various things that happened with school and church, so we started moving down that way. And then my husband said, Well you know, I've got my own self-identification journey that's come, and that can be important. I want to speak to dads about being more involved in their kids’ special needs journey—because he had kind of abdicated that role to me—and why you’ve got to be more important, why you've got to be more supportive of your wife, and you've got your own diagnosis. How might that be? So we're like, Okay, the three of us are going to write a book. And then my youngest said, Well I'm neurodivergent too, I have ADHD. ADHD hardly gets talked about, because autism gets the spotlight over ADHD. And you know sometimes, being a sibling to someone on the spectrum is not always parades and balloons. As we said, there's some difficult dark sides of that. So I wanted to add the sibling piece.
So we kind of put it all together, and we decided that we didn't just want it to be a story, because there's a lot of stories out there. So we've incorporated a spiritual reflection devotional at the end of each chapter. If I was going through a faith crisis or whatever was going on, here's verses that help me, and here's some story and narrative around it. And then at the end of the book, I'm very excited about this—and this is about be the resource—but if you don't know what to do, if you're a church, I put—you can connect to Key Ministry, and there's three other ministries that you can connect to; here's some things they do that are free. Here are some paid services. You can't say you don't know who to contact! Here are actually four places you can contact, with websites and everything, and other places, and lots of other speakers who’ve been with Key Ministry. I put everybody in there. Get a coach, get a community, connect your church. So I collected—in fact, the Key Ministry conference (Disability and the Church). I was like I want you, I want you, I want you; I’m going to put your name in here; I'm going to put your name in here. And it's not just about us and our book. Even if you don't want my resources, if you connect to somebody else's resources because they live near you, or they're a good resource for you—we're about people getting resources and community. So we wanted our book to be more than a story. We're calling it a resource and a guide on your journey.
So that was kind of our story: be the thing, be the person that you wanted. So we've taken our 20 years of the journey and put it into the book, through story, devotion and practical tips and resources.
CB: Well that sounds phenomenal. I'm going to share the link to the book. Tell everybody what your website is, and we'll share a link to that, too.
SH: You can find out anything about the book at www.christianneurodiversefamilies.com and you can see where the ebook, the audio or the print book is from that one site.
CB: Fabulous. Again, we'll make sure that we have that linked in our show notes. Stephanie, thank you so much for your time. This has been just a fabulous conversation. It definitely took some directions that I didn't anticipate, but that's the beauty of podcasting. I would just encourage all the listeners, if you aren't familiar with Stephanie's resources, to go check them out, because she's got a lot of great insight from not only the personal lens, but also the professional lens, and that's a really important and helpful combination when you're looking for some resources.
So thank you again for listening to Key Ministry the Podcast. I encourage you, if you haven't subscribed to us, go ahead and hit that subscribe button right now, so you never miss an episode like this great conversation that we've had today with Stephanie Holmes. For the whole Key Ministry team, I'm Catherine Boyle. Thanks so much for joining me on Key Ministry the Podcast.
Stephanie’s links for podcast show notes:
https://www.holmesasr.com/embracing-the-autism-spectrum
https://www.christianneurodiversemarriage.com/
