I launched this site some five months ago and have had an itch in my head ever since. I had always promised myself, having been an avid peruser of writings by authors far smarter and more articulate, that I would not add to the noise – in print or online – unless I had something truly unique to say.

Fact of the matter is, I’m still waiting. I’ve always been something of a perfectionist, never wanting to do anything unless it measured up to my narcissistic standard of “world class”. But sometimes, you just have to start and cut yourself a little slack as you push ahead.

There was a bigger reason for my delay in beginning this blog, however: I didn’t want to begin while my world felt like it was imploding. Let me give you a little of the backstory.

Almost two years ago (722 days, to be exact), I married a woman that I was convinced did not exist. Jocelyn was the wife that God had planned for me, and I still marvel at the fact that she chose me! Only a year before our wedding, we had not met and I was in the process of making peace with the possibility that, at forty-one years old, God’s plan for me was a life of singleness.

Jocelyn and I spent the next eighteen months in relative wedded bliss, even beating the prevailing attitude that the first year of marriage is the toughest. We were so well matched on so many different levels that our worst disagreement wouldn’t have made it out of the bottom tenth percentile of many couples. We were even navigating through the first trimester of her pregnancy and the attendant waves of nausea that were more often the rule than the exception in Jocelyn’s case.

And then there was the day that it all went sideways. March 24th of this year, we went in for a routine ultrasound meant to eliminate the possibility of a problem with the pregnancy. We came away with something that we frankly hadn’t signed up for. There was an anomaly in the thickness of the Nuchal Fold (called a “soft marker”) that points to a statistically higher possibility of Down Syndrome. The doctors suggested more testing to confirm or refute the results; and after a lot of prayer and soul searching, we agreed to an amniocentesis a few weeks later.

The word from the medical community quickly went from “there is an elevated possibility of a problem” to “we’re pretty darned sure there’s a problem”. During the ultrasound for the amnio, the imaging specialist found a heart defect and the genetic test results eventually confirmed Trisome 21 – a third DNA strand attached to the more typical 21st pair of 23 chromosomes.

I have had only a few screaming matches in my walk with God. They are done in solitude and usually leave my vocal cords pretty raw, but I figure that God wants it all – the good, the bad and the very, very ugly. My only pointed question to him that sunny spring day when we got the preliminary (and normally pretty darned accurate) results was:

What.          Are.          You.          Doing?

I got no (audible) answer that day, but my mind has since been wrestling with the brief words I’ve caught in my moments of reflection and from those prophetic oracles that come from my tribe of trusted friends and confidants. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

For over five years, I’ve overseen the Care initiatives at a church of over ten thousand people. I sit on the board of an organization in India that reaches out to the poorest of the poor and currently feeds, houses and educates over two hundred kids who would otherwise have to survive a life of petty crime and prostitution. I’ve seen my share of sad stories. My message to people in pain is hopefully not overly simplistic, and hopefully delivered humbly:

The world needs you.

We need you to move into this challenge and experience the full spectrum of emotion that God has for you in it. We need you to approach this season with the attitude of a student and not a victim. We need you to surround yourself with a trusted community who can encourage and sustain you through the discomfort that will undoubtedly come. This season may be a short one or may last a lifetime; but we will need you to plumb the depths of it, find beauty even in the midst of the struggle and add your stories to the narrative of the One who redeems the world’s brokenness. And in so doing, speak with a credibility that can only be had through suffering a broken world well, knowing that this is only the beginning of a much greater adventure.

That, or something very much like it, is what I tell people in crisis. I wonder if God is leading Jocelyn and I into this wanting me to start putting my money where my mouth is.

So here I sit in the rocking chair of my daughter Julia’s room as my wife takes a much needed nap from the fatigue of the ninth month of pregnancy. We are only a few weeks away from truly knowing the results of God’s craftsmanship. Even now, we still sit in the tension between knowing that God could re-knit our daughter right down to her DNA, or he could choose to do something even greater in us (and in the world) through a little girl with Down Syndrome. In the end, my deepest conviction is that this kid is going to have a massive impact for good.

Worries of the “ninth-month-of-pregnancy” roller coaster and the financial, medical and emotional implications of Julia’s heart defect still catch me by surprise sometimes. But here in the cool of this September afternoon, I can be thankful that Ultimate Good has captured my heart and continues to change the questions I ask of eternity. Today, with still a little fear, but with growing confidence in the God who pursues me, I say:

Bring it.

And I thank you for joining our little family on the new adventure that God has for us.