Autism is Awesome!
Autism is not a dirty word, because it doesn’t define who I am. It is a label. It is a condition God wove into His perfect design for me. Autism is awesome!
Describing autism as awesome doesn’t diminish the struggles in my journey, yet neither does it take away the joy of my walk with Him. I haven’t always felt this way. My early life was struggle after struggle. Awesome would have seemed a farfetched idea. After my growth in understanding God’s perfect design and plan, it has become easy to grasp that autism is awesome.
John 9:1-3 reveals how God uses what the world sees as defects for His glory. Jesus’ disciples were asking Jesus about why a man was blind. They believed his detriment was due to his sin or his parent’s sin. Jesus proclaimed his blindness was to reveal God’s glory. God made us in His image, and He perfectly wove every trait, whether man sees it as good or bad. Man has limited understanding of His ways, but God makes no mistakes in His creations, His plans, or His timing. The last chapters of Job show us how we are so limited in knowledge of God’s ways, but we need to be obedient.
“The foolishness of the cross is the wisdom of God, and the wisdom of God is powerful in its impact.” – Alister Begg. In general, man mocks God’s ways as foolishness. We don’t see the beauty of adversity in His plans. This statement is brilliant. We can’t see the power in the cross because we can’t see the awesomeness in our gifted afflictions, like autism. When you fully see the impact of the cross, God’s love, plans, and design are truly supernatural. God who sent His son to die for our sin to reconcile us back to Him, is the same God who gifted all our idiosyncrasies. Man will mock God’s beautiful design of afflictions, because we mock what we don’t understand or fear.
Autism is awesome because I need to smile during the storms. When Jesus asked his followers to take up the cross, this was not going to be a life of leisure. Jesus’ life was full of hardship, but He served joyfully. As His follower, I have learned to embrace and not be ashamed of the afflictions. I am wonderfully made in His image to glorify God in building His Kingdom. He modeled my story for His work to be equipped to serve others feeling the marginalization of autism and mental illness. He calls me to share with others His restoring love through the cross, so that He can comfort them and grow them to see their affliction as awesome, not as a disabling thorn in their side that keeps them from experiencing God’s best for them. Paul struggled with his thorn and pleaded for God to remove it, but God gave him grace. Through this grace, Paul’s ministry flourished like beautiful flowers on a thorny bush.
When we humble ourselves to God’s creation, plan, and will, His calling flourishes through our affliction revealing His glory. We humble ourselves by releasing the binds of shame and fear due to worldly notions of affliction. We can plead with Him to remove it, but His grace is supernatural in His love for us, revealing how we are to partake in His mission. Autism is awesome in His design, ways, and blessing.