Radical Acceptance and the Fullness of Joy

January is no longer a time when I lament who I haven’t yet become. Instead, I am choosing radical acceptance both for who I am and who I am becoming.

I have not gotten here quickly or easily; rather, this is a hard-earned, always evolving lens through which I’m learning to frame my story. I’m inviting you into my own story, praying that you too, will find the extravagant, freeing, radically accepting love of Jesus as the defining story in your life.

When my husband Ben and I married in May 2009, we wrote this line into our vows: I love the person you are, and I promise to love the person you’re becoming. For some inexplicable reason, this pledge made perfect sense to vow to my husband, but it would be nearly a decade before I realized how desperately I needed to apply this God-given truth to myself.

I grew up with relative self-confidence, as I was well-loved, well-adjusted, and had plenty of friends and good grades to boot. I never anticipated the well of self-doubt motherhood would birth in me.

Nine years ago, my son Reed was born. My pregnancy was uneventful. At birth, his Apgar scores were an 8 and an 8. He had a shock of beautiful red hair (like his dad). I was smitten and overwhelmed, exhilarated and shell-shocked, in awe and totally exhausted.

For every bit of the pregnancy that was uneventful, his first months proved to be equally bewildering and difficult. First, nursing and latch issues, then, acid reflux. We were constantly weighing his little body and coming up wanting. Failure to thrive was the diagnosis. We had just started out as parents. How we were already failing? We faced missed milestones, a referral for physical therapy for hypotonia, torticollis, and his first hospital stay at eight months because of respiratory issues. Finally, just three weeks shy of his first birthday, the answer landed in our laps: that redheaded baby had been born with a rare genetic disorder, the culprit behind all of those unanswered questions.

In that moment when we learned his true diagnosis, when all I knew of how the world worked (that is if I followed the rules and prayed and loved God, then everything would work out) completely unraveled, a shadow fell over me. I wish I could have known then what Beth Matheson so beautifully penned: “those shadows are in your eyes because your soul is deepening, stretching, overlapping into eternity.”

Instead, I felt like my soul had shrunk to less than half the size it had been. No one ever told me how soul stretching would feel like death.

My soul was sodden and soggy with grief, which eventually became dried out and brittled by unanswered questions and prayers. My soul groped in the dark, questioning how the God I thought I trusted could so radically break me and shatter my dreams of a “good” life.

Ann Voskamp writes in One Thousand Gifts, “the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is.” If I could rewrite this part of my story, I would have pressed into God even in the doubt and confusion.

Instead, when my soul could no longer bear the weight of grief, I turned to productivity. What I couldn’t accept, what I couldn’t understand, I was going to fix. Therapy and appointments and evaluations and IEPs and late-night Google searches and alternative medicine became my work. My scraped raw soul latched on to any small shard of hope I could grasp. Honestly, as much as I was motivated to help my son, I was also trying to claw my way out of a life I never wanted.

As our daily life increasingly revolved around all of these reminders that my child was atypical, I started to believe more and more that I had to fix him, that the world would never make a place for him unless I did. I convinced myself that I must work as hard as I could to mend his “broken.” It turned out that what Reed really needed, even more than the therapies and interventions, was radical acceptance born from love. In truth, what I needed was to learn the art of radical acceptance myself.

Learning to accept fully a “broken” dream was one of the first and greatest challenges of being a parent to a child with special needs. In the almost-decade of this journey, I am learning to accept, with radical grace and love, that even in this story I wouldn’t have written for my son, God is here and we are good, and “in [God’s] presence is fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11).

Lord, I worry that so many of us turn to the productivity of “fixing” ourselves, our bodies, our finances, our children, our jobs instead of facing the grief, the disappointments, the brokenness in our lives straight on and expecting you to meet us there. Lord, help us reject the lie that if we’re to be loved, valuable, needed, or known, we must first mend our broken selves or circumstances. Lord, help us see and know the full joy, the grace, the love that is found when we look for you in the places where we least expect it. Help our hearts know the security of the sparrow and be confident in the tender care of the lilies. Lead us to the same radical acceptance in our own lives that you showed to the tax collectors, the religious scholars, the prostitutes, the disciples, the outcasts, the children, the lepers, the adulterers, the somebodies and the nobodies. For from the overflow of our own hearts we live more fully in you, like you, and because of you. Amen.

May January become the month you set your focus on and celebrate radical acceptance.

Allison Byxbe is a writer, blogger, and occasional college professor. She lives with her husband, three kiddos, and dogs Nate and Jemma in South Carolina. When she’s not writing or teaching others to write, she enjoys hiking, making beeswax wraps, learning about natural health, taking road trips, and drinking the perfect latte. Allison loves to connect with others about family, special needs parenting, mental health, grief, and faith. Her writing has been featured on The Mighty and Her View from Home, and you can find more of it on her blog Writing Is Cheaper Than Therapy.

Photograph © Iga Palacz, used with permission