Our daughter was born with Down syndrome.
I can think of nowhere other than the church in which I would want to raise her.
From the first day, our church family has loved and support us through every aspect of her life.
Yet, one downside of dealing with a public birth, is that people’s bad theology can be exposed.
Some believe that sickness is a sign of sin. Not understanding the nature of being fallen people in a fallen world, they create a belief that anything bad can be traced back to the sin of one of the sufferers.
While we didn’t hear it much, it was murmured after our daughter was born, “I wonder what they did?”
The thought was that we had done something to deserve a daughter with a diagnosis.
Of course there are two problems with this thought:
- There is not a direct cause and effect relationship between individual sin and sickness.
- It makes our daughter sound like a punishment instead of a blessing.
Neither are accurate.
In John 9, Jesus tells the story of a man born blind. The disciples ask Jesus who sinned, “this man or his parents?”
Jesus responded, it was neither the man nor his parents, but “this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”
As it was in John 9, it is today.
We didn’t do anything to deserve a daughter with Down syndrome. We didn’t do anything bad to deserve her and we didn’t do anything good to deserve her.
We live in a world where our genes are fallen. Every child is born with broken genes. Because of those genes, we are pre-disposed to a number of conditions. One of those conditions is Down syndrome.
My daughter will not have Down syndrome in heaven. And in heaven, I will not have many of the faults and problems present in my life. What I don’t know is how many chromosomes will we have in heaven.
