"The Joys, Challenges, Tears and Laughs of a Dad with Special Children" by Tony Zook

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Strength to Strength. Here at Strength to Strength, we try to provide content that is edifying and encouraging. And this morning we have Brother Tony Zook from Minnesota. I'm not sure what part of Minnesota you're from, Tony.

International call. Pretty close to there. He's going to share on the joys, challenges, tears, and laughs of a dad with special children. And I guess this would fall under a testimony, and I find testimonies of the work of God in someone's life to be very encouraging and edifying. It's beautiful to see God's work in people's lives, and in the case of this morning, in the life of a family. It made me think of Psalms 127, verse 3. It says, "Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward, like arrows in the hand of a warrior. So are the children of one's youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.

They shall not be ashamed, but shall speak with their enemies in the gate." Before we get started, let's have a word of prayer.

Holy Father in heaven, we praise your name this morning. We thank you for your hand of love and compassion on each one of us. We thank you for each one that's gathered here this morning. We pray that your overseeing eye of protection would be upon each one of us. Be with Brother Tony as he shares. Pray, Lord, that he would share freely of the work that you've done in their lives as a family. I just pray that this talk this morning could be a blessing to each one of us, that we would be encouraged in our faith. Just go with us, direct us, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Go ahead, Brother Tony, and God bless you as you share.

Thank you, Sam. Good morning to everyone this morning. This call has been a real blessing to me. It's been a discipline to get up and sit here every morning. And I've been a big promoter, and I have lots of friends who listen, but I have very few who get up and get on here in the morning. And I think that would be a—there's a different blessing to being on here than just listening to it later on in the day as you're working. So I would encourage people to do that.

So I'm from Lomond, Minnesota. It's a little town way up northern Minnesota by some international falls. And

get my screen up here.

There we go. And we have six children, and we're part of a little small church up here. Our youngest daughter has Down syndrome, and she's fairly high functioning. And just to give you a little bit of an anecdote on where she's at with that, she can't wait till she's 17 and can go work at Subway. That's just one of her goals in life, that she wants to do that and get a cell phone. That's pretty big for her.

And marriage and Maranatha Bible School are also pretty big in her things that she would like to do in life.

Earlier this summer, I was talking to another one of my daughters about saving money for Bible school and working for the summer. And we had about a half-hour session. And when we was all done, Kendra comes in, and she's standing here by the door with a piece of paper, and she stutters a fair bit, and she gets nervous. And so she has her paper there in her hand, and she's like, "So on Fridays, I clean bathrooms, and you give me dollars," she said.

And I'm like, "Oh, okay." And she says, "And when I get older, I'm going to teach school." And her sister and brother both teach school, and so she wants to do that. And there's some things we just say, "Well, we'll let the Lord decide that. We don't know if you'll get married or not." But this one, I was like, "We know you're not teaching school." And I was like, "So I should tamp this down a little bit."

And so I said, "Well, I don't think you'll be teaching school. I just don't think that's what God will have." She sits there a little bit, and then she goes, "Aw, rats." So that's her—yeah, she's fairly high functioning. We also did foster care for several years, and the last little girl we had, we adopted. She has significant medical needs, daily procedures, and as well as social, emotional, behavioral.

We have lots of challenges with her. But most of my stuff today, I will focus on our oldest daughter.

I'd like to look at two sides of this. The first is accepting the child that God has given you, and the second one is then tips on how other people can relate to families that have special children in them, relating to people with special needs. So 14 years ago, we entered the world of special needs.

Our lives were forever changed. It opened up new challenges, but also new opportunities. We became part of a new circle of friends. You meet new people that you didn't really notice before, and you're part of maybe an education group or something in our community that we wouldn't have been part of before.

It's opened lots of doors for us. And I don't think of our daughter as defining our family as to who we are. I don't think I'm—yeah, I don't think of a family as us as a family with a special needs child, really. But I'm sure other people would feel that way as they looked at us, and they looked at our family, and, "Oh, yeah, there's Tony's family."

And for the most part, I think I can say we've accepted and embraced where God has put us here. When she's just Kendra, like we've talked before, what do we want her to change? What do we want God to heal her at that? I don't know. She's Kendra. We love Kendra the way she is.

When she was born, it felt like we were entering a new world. Yeah, it was a new world, and I felt like the world was forever changed. And it was. It is completely different. But on the other hand, we're still normal. And there's a mother with a special needs son. She wrote that one time she looks at her son and thinks, "Oh, he looks like someone who has Down syndrome." And then she's like, "Oh, yeah, he does have Down syndrome."

But we don't really think of our daughter in that way. It's just she's just Kendra. And we have a blast. We have all kinds of fun with her. She's just a ball of fun. She's fun to pick on.

Sometimes, though, we think about where life could have been, or I think about—it's to think of the pain, though, of she'll never be normal. And to think that she can't think these things through, or that she'll never be able to be married, or those are—yeah, those are real things. We were at a homeschool convention a few years ago in Manitoba.

It was a large group, and I didn't really know any people there, very few. And there was an art class for the children for the day, and there was a course that the children participated in. And that day, my wife saw Kendra through the eyes of a stranger. We always are in groups of friends and that everybody knows Kendra. And this time, my wife saw her through the eyes of a stranger. And Kendra was up there singing that day with the group, all the other children her age, and she's kind of hitching up her dress and looking around and gawking everywhere else and doing what she's supposed to be doing. And my wife, she just saw her in a different light.

And at the end of the day, my wife went to pick up her piece of art that she had in her art class, and they were supposed to draw a wolf howling or something like that. And then Martha's like, "Well, how in the world am I going to find her piece of art in a stack of 40 pieces of 40 paintings? How am I going to know which one was hers?" And she's looked at it, and all of a sudden, she saw it. And she's like, "Oh, yeah, that's Kendra's."

And it just broke her heart. She's like, "Couldn't have someone given her a little pointer or showed her some other color besides spheres of blacks and grays."

And when we left her that day, Martha was in tears as she shared kind of her journey of that day. Several weeks later, though, I found that picture hanging in our bedroom. And it still hangs there today, and it's more of a testimony of where Martha's heart is than the benefit of the art, we'll put it that way.

I said recently, I don't consider us to be burdened with our children. But as I was reflecting on it, in reality, my wife is. Whenever I get a hair-brained idea, I was talking to Hoover about a funeral this weekend, and, "Oh, we really should go." And then my wife's brain starts spinning, and she starts thinking about diabetes control and behavior control and lack of structure and how do we drag all these medical supplies along. And she has a full-time job. And at times, yeah, at times we are burdened.

Maybe more often than just times. But we definitely have gray hairs. Several months after Kendra was born, I was assigned a topic at a Bible conference on John 14. And John 14 says, "Let not your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God. Believe also in me." And as I was thinking on that verse, the thing that stood out to me in that verse was that, "Ye believe in God." That is what makes our heart is not troubled. And one of the points that I had was that I believe in the God of Joel.

And the reason that is special to me is because I have a God who knows everything about me. He knows my strengths. He knows my weaknesses. And yet, he still allows me to go through trials. And he knows how much I can handle.

And that is a benefit. Imagine if you didn't know that and that your world is just going bad.

But I know that I have a God who knows me. I know I have a God who cares for me and will only allow so much. He puts his hand up, and he stops Satan. And that is just a tremendous blessing to me. And as after Kendra was born, we thought we did. I felt like Joel. I thought I had life. I had accepted what God had given us that first morning.

After we heard it, I accepted that. And this is okay. It could be worse. And then about six weeks later, we had heart surgery, and that felt like blow number two. But God is in control. And there's a song we refer to, and it became very special to us during this time. And we call it Kendra's song. And she's getting old enough now that I have to be a little careful when I talk about that she's around because she doesn't like me to talk about her and tell her story.

But Ron Hamilton wrote a song after he had eye cancer. And you might, if you're into kids' stories, he's Catch the Pirate. And he wrote this song called Rejoice in the Lord. And it's become very special to our family. God never moves without purpose or plan when trying his servant and molding the man. Give thanks to the Lord, though your testing seems long. In darkness, he giveth a song.

Second verse says, "I could not see through the shadows ahead, so I looked at the cross of my Savior instead. I bowed to the will of the Master that day, then peace came, and tears fled away. Now I can see testing comes from above. God strengthens his children and purges in love. My Father knows best, and I trust in his care. Through purging, more fruit I will bear." And then the chorus says, "Oh, rejoice in the Lord. He makes no mistake. He knows the end of each path that I take. For when I am tried and purified, I shall come forth as gold."

And as we think of Kendra, she is not a mistake. God made her, and God placed her in our family. That's actually from Joel there, I believe. "He knows the end of each path that I take." I was at a friend's church for meetings one time, and on Sunday afternoon, I was sitting in the living room there visiting with them, and my friend says, "Tony, how can you handle having a child with special needs?

How do you mentally accept this? How do you do that? He doesn't know if he could do that." I was like, "Brother, you're the one whose four-year-old died from cancer, and every letter you used to sign off with still finding grace for the moment." I said, "You don't get this." And he had grace for what he went through, and God gives us grace for what we went through. And he was saying they had a family in their church who really struggled with accepting their child.

And I just launched. I got all fired up, and I said, "Man, if I didn't have an assigned subject tonight, I would be talking about, 'Oh, rejoice in the Lord. He makes no mistake.'" And I had to put in a little pre-sermon talk to that just to encourage them because it is discouraging. It is lots of work. Kendra's pretty easy to take care of. Actually, our little girl we adopted causes much more anguish.

But special needs children have a place—yeah, I just—if I see one and see a child in town, especially someone with Down syndrome, I got to be over there and talk to them. I say I do not feel sorry for people with special needs children. I empathize with them, and I understand their trouble, but I do not feel sorry for them. So if you're blessed with a special child, take heart.

God knows, and God allowed that child. People say that, "Oh, you must have a special family. That's why God gave you a special child." No. No, we're just normal people, and God changed us, but we weren't special.

I've been very blessed with the way our children have been accepted. We've never had any bad comments or I've had some insensitive comments one time. One time, I had a rather uppity society guy, I guess, in our community here. I was talking to him, and he was like, "Oh, his sisters are just—they're scatterbrains." He said, "About like your daughter."

That's the closest thing I got to a slam. And I didn't take it personal, but I felt it. But for the most part, people are very helpful. And our society has done a lot to help children in the last 50, 60 years. Before then, it was not near as accepting.

Hitler annihilated children with special needs. Poor countries just put them in orphanages. And the United States, 60 years ago, wasn't a whole lot different.

Now we have—it's almost cool to stand up for these children. There's a story of—there's multiple stories, actually, but one of them is of a boy who was the water boy for the local football team in high school. And he was there for every practice, every game. He was always there, always faithfully did his part. And in his senior year, his coach put him in pads for the week and made a deal with the opposing team and let him run for a touchdown. And the whole community cheered him on, and I always get tears when I read the story. But that's kind of where we are today with children with Down syndrome. They're much more accepted than they used to be.

Statistically, there's more children with special needs or with Down syndrome living than there ever has. Also, statistically—and that's because of medical things—also, statistically, there's more children—there's fewer being born than there ever have because of abortion. And just for interest's sake, last week, I read a story of a lady in Britain with Down syndrome. She's 23 years old. She's married. And she's suing the British government because they allow abortions of children with Down syndrome. And she's—and that's discriminating against me. And so there are some children who are very high-functioning.

So how do we relate to people with special needs? So if you see a child with special needs or a family, how do you relate to them? What do you do for them? Do we look at them sideways, out of the corner of our eye, and watch all the strange things they do? Because we do strange things. There's no doubt about that.

Or how do you accept them? How do you encourage them? The first thing that a special needs family needs is encouragement. And as I was writing this, I remembered many things. My sister took care of a little boy named Ben, and I'll mention his mom later.

And Ben had cerebral palsy, was in a wheelchair, could only communicate with his eyes. He could look at you for yes and look away for no. That's the only way he could communicate. His mind fully functioned, but he could not communicate in any way. And he would scream if he couldn't communicate well. And my sister really struggled with caring for him at first. And then she learned to love Ben. And yeah, she was married in Pennsylvania when Ben passed away, and she flew back to Minneapolis to be with his family. And they couldn't wait for her to get there. Anyhow, so that's Heidi's background. And she's the first person we told that morning. It was the middle of the night.

I knew she was up. And so I called her, and I said, "We have a little girl." And she's like, "Oh, good." And I said, "And she's special." And the first thing that Heidi said was she was crying. And she said, "Oh, I'm so happy for you."

That just blessed us. Another lady, another girl, she was 21, and she had a sister with Down syndrome. And when she came in that morning to the hospital to visit us, she said, "Your family will change. It's going to affect the way your family looks at life." And that is true. We got lots of letters. We got letters from people we had no idea who they were.

We still get Christmas letters and pictures and so on that we have on our board of people that have children with Down syndrome. If Martha knows of someone who was born, she's going to send them a letter.

Now, I mentioned my sister, Heidi, took care of Ben. And so the morning after Kendra was born, I saw Ben's mom. I saw his transportation van at the hospital. So I went looking for Ben. And we were friends with Ben and of his family. They were not Christian people. And I went looking for Melissa that morning, and I found Melissa and Ben down at therapy.

And so I told her, I said, "Well, we had a little girl last night, and she has Down syndrome." And now you understand this lady has a child who takes 24/7 care.

Life is very difficult for them. And I said, "We have a special little girl, and she just about jumped up and down for joy." She just got all excited. And when you're a new dad and you're just kind of struggling with this, that just did wonders.

And there's a poem called Welcome to Holland. And many of you may have read it already. And I just read that two days before Kendra was born. I read it in the Midwest Focus. So after Kendra was born, I read it to Martha, or I just related it to Martha.

And I related this also to Ben's mom. I said, "There's this poem called Welcome to Holland." And she said, "Oh, yes." She says, "I have that, and it's framed, and it's hanging over Ben's bed." And that afternoon, she came into the hospital, and she gave my wife this framed poem from over Ben's bed. We said, "Oh, no, that's yours." "No," she says, "I can get another one. You can have this one." And we still have that framed in our bedroom today.

Welcome to Holland. This lady, she had a child with Down syndrome. She says, "I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it. To imagine how it would feel." Well, it's like this. When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks, and you make your wonderful plans. The Colosseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas of Venice. You may learn some handy phrases, and it's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags, and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. And the stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland." "Holland," you say, "What do you mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy. I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life, I dreamed of going to Italy. But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland, and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of pestilence, famine, and disease. It's just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guidebooks, and you must learn a whole new language, and you'll meet a whole new group of people you have never met before. It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy. It's less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there a while and you catch your breath and you look around, you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's where I had planned." And the pain of that will never, ever, ever go away because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland. And that still is in our bedroom today, along with her artwork. And I believe there's a few things there that she has of her better artwork as well.

So that was encouraging to us. I have a friend in Pennsylvania. His son was born with Down syndrome, and he was all discouraged about it. And he said he went the next day to a—he took care of yards, and he went to someone's house the next day. And he said it was an Amish couple there. And they had a daughter with Down syndrome, he said, who was overweight and slovenly and was not well-kept.

And yeah. And so he got there, and the guy meets him, and the door says, "Hi, how are you today?" And he's like, "Well, I'm fine. I just had a—we just had a little boy with Down syndrome." And he said, the guy says, "Mama, come Down syndrome." And just got all excited about Dave's little boy. And Dave says, "Well, if he can get excited about it, I can too." And so encouragement is just huge. It's not the end of the world. Sure, it changes your world. It'll never be the same again.

But it is not the end of the world.

Life still goes on. Life is still good.

Encouragement has been huge. And not words that you can't fix it, but words of encouragement in the midst of what we're facing. The second thing a special family needs is space. When you first get your diagnosis, you feel like a cistern that's just—you don't know. And you just have all this information that you—the poor's in. And they give you all these pamphlets. And a child with Down syndrome, you need to have their kidneys checked. You need to have their eyes checked and their ears checked and their thyroid checked. And you need to do this every year. And it's just like on and on and on. And it's like, "If I don't do that with my other children, why?"

And so you got to—so where do we go? How do we do this? What do we do? I said, "It's kind of like cancer. When you get cancer, everyone you meet knows somebody that did something that did or did not work and that you should or should not do this thing."

And they have all this advice, and that can be overwhelming. And we're open to ideas. I mean, we never did this before. We don't know what we're doing.

But we get lots of ideas, and lots of ideas that contradict. And so you got to give a family with special needs some space that they—space to do what they can do or what they need to do, decisions that work for us. So when Kendra was first born, I said, "Well, I guess we'll have to send her to public school because we certainly don't know how to teach a child with special needs." And so we thought, "Well, maybe we'll have to send her to school."

And lots of families do. And so we had a trip one summer shortly after she was born, and we kind of dubbed it our Down syndrome trip. It seemed everywhere we stopped, we kept running into people with children with Down syndrome and friends. And there was one little girl we met. And we came to their house, and we had never met her before. Her mom was a good friend of mine, my wife.

And when we got out of the car, Destiny started naming us: Tony, Martha, Kevin. And she went right down the list and named all of the children. And she'd never met us before. She'd just seen our picture. She was five years old. And I said, "If I ever have a child—if my child turns out like her, I will have hit a home run." And she was homeschooled. And it was like, "Wow." And of all the children we met on that trip, she was the highest functioning. And she was homeschooled. And I can't say that that's why, but there was a correlation there that we noted.

And so we ended up—we homeschooled.

Destiny is way excelled where Kendra is. She plays the piano, and she quizzes, and she runs the cash register for the farmer's market. She does very well.

So yeah, so some people do that. My mom had a cousin. Of course, this would have been back in the '60s, maybe. And when he was born, when he turned five years old, he was placed in an institution.

And we can say, "Oh, how terrible." And I'm sure it was. Five years old, and there he went. But his brother commented that he figured out that his parents had put on a million miles, I think it was, because every Friday night, they would go pick him up and bring him home for the weekend. Sunday night, they'd take him back home, back to the institution again.

And Dougie lived there for his whole life until he was in his 50s, I believe, when he passed away. And after his parents had passed away, this was his home. This was his life. And so he had a home. He had friends. He had a job. And his brother, Dougie's brother, did not see this necessarily as a bad thing that he was put in this institution.

So that can happen. Some people do therapy. One of our acquaintances in MNL, they did therapy five days a week. Lots of therapists. You have this child, and you don't know what their potential is. And the only way you'll find out is by trying. And so you've got to push as hard as you can, as long as you can, because maybe they can learn how to do this. So you want to try.

But how much and how far? And so she had therapists in there five days a week. And after Kendra was three years old, we stopped therapy. It was just more disruptive to our family than it was beneficial. So we give space.

We're currently looking with our youngest daughter, who we've adopted. We've been having lots of behavioral issues, and I'm learning a whole nother set of needs. And going against all my things I've thought, whatever, we are actually having a meeting next week with the local counseling center and looking at diagnosis. We have ADHD as our medication.

And I told my wife, "You know what?" I said, "We're going to get shot for that." Some people aren't going to get that. And they're going to say, "Oh, you shouldn't do that. You should pray or you should whatever." And then there's other people you talk to that are in these one mom said her boys begged to get back on their medication because they just couldn't function. They couldn't obey when they didn't have their medication. And so I said, "You know what? Some people are going to get this, and some people aren't." And just give space to families with special needs with where they're at.

My cousin says, "These children don't come with a manual. You have to figure it out." And that's true. Actually, my cousin, they used medical marijuana for a while, which was very helpful. So yeah, give people space to learn, to try, and then to try something else.

Be understanding. We know we have a special child. That's quite obvious to us.

And we know they do strange things. And for the most part, we're okay with that. They embarrass us. And for the most part, we're okay with that. I went to teach at Maranatha Bible School, and it was the first time I was there. I was a nervous wreck. I'm trying to fill my spot as a teacher. And we actually had kind of some stomach issues when we got there, and we were afraid we were dragging the flu in. And I was a nervous wreck. That's a whole nother story. And so Kendra's five years old, and we're standing there before food, before supper one night. And Kendra's pretty short. And there was a table there with the pie on it.

So there was the normal food line where you went through, and then they had another table beside it full of pies. And Kendra was just about right head level for the pies. And the cooks pointed out that Kendra was walking down the table there with the pies and she was licking the whipped cream off of each pie as she went by it.

My wife was just mortified. We're just, "Oh." You know what? And nobody switched the pies out. They just took it and went with it.

We need moments like that. We need people to be able to just accept who we are, see that we're embarrassed, and it's just fine.

I don't know how many of you have 14-year-old daughters you have to work on getting them to keep their dress down. It's just, "Kendra, pull your dress down." And, "Oh, yeah, get your dress down." We've been teaching her that since she was little, and we continue to teach that.

It's just the way life is. Most people sneeze and know that you should cover your mouth, and she does. But if we would sneeze and have some bad aftereffects, we'd be all like all embarrassed. And she's not embarrassed. She just knows she needs to wipe her face. And so yeah, be understanding of the people that we have, the children we have. Accept them, befriend them. This is Kendra loves people and friends just like everyone else.

The people who are her friends, they're her friends. She really, really has people she enjoys.

They're her heroes. There's a girl from our church who she doesn't live here anymore. She moved away to teach school. But when she comes home, Kendra's across the church parking lot, 90 miles an hour, to go over and give Jolene a hug because Jolene's her friend. One of the ladies in our church, she has arthritis and kind of sits in her—we have a knee chair for her in the back of the church to sit on. And she took a purse and filled it with special toys and whatever. And after church, Kendra could go back and play with this purse. And that was Miriam's way of befriending Kendra. And that was always a big deal for her.

Kendra's friends stack pretty high with her parents as well. If you take care of the daughters of our child, that's pretty important to us as well. I think all of us want to reach out to people like this.

We all desire to. But we just don't know how to do it. And even me, if I go into a—I was in Cabela's one time, and here was a family with a little baby with Down syndrome. And my eye just peeking around the aisle, trying to figure out how to make contact, how to talk to them. So I kind of introduced myself, and it looked to me like I was kind of trying to strange wacko. But how do we do that? We want to do it tactfully and encourage people. And sometimes we just don't know how to do that. But I encourage you to just be a real friend.

I asked my wife and some friends of ours, "How do we wish people would—what do we wish they would do in relating to our children? What are some things that we wish they would do?"

The first thing was to just treat them normal.

Kendra can carry on a conversation. You just have to be patient. And sometimes she doesn't get all the details quite right. Sometimes she stutters.

But just be patient. We had a diabetes appointment in Duluth here a couple of weeks ago, about three hours away. And the childcare worker came in and was asking Kendra questions. "So how was your summer?" And the conversation is not with the parents. It was with Kendra. And so what? "Well, she's my brother got married this summer.

Kevin got married. And Krista works at Hardee's. And I like going swimming at my aunt's house. And there was a skunk at my aunt's garage." And they just had this whole conversation going. It was a normal conversation between two adults. And the parents weren't involved with it.

So just treat her normal. And that's actually the best advice we got, was to treat her normal. She can learn anything theoretically. It just takes longer. And so just treat them normal. They can learn how to be potty trained. It just took her to six years old.

You can learn how to do this. It just takes longer. It also takes longer for discipline. Watch your normal child learn by seven. We still sometimes, with hard pain, we're dealing with the same things. It takes longer, but just be patient.

But you still have the same expectations to a certain extent.

You still need to respect and obey. You can't get away with those kind of things.

Kendra goes to visit my mom every Friday afternoon or every other Friday. And if she gets coffee, which is a pretty big deal, they sit and have coffee together. And my folks also have a golf cart that they had from my grandpa. And so they have driving lessons. And my mom is teaching Kendra how to drive the golf cart.

And that's a pretty big—that's a pretty big deal for Kendra. She took me for a drive the other day, and I had to grab the steering wheel once and tell her to slow down a little bit. But she's getting it.

So just treat them normal. She loves simple pleasures of life. She likes to help do dishes. At Maranatha, with all the health regulations, she really couldn't help wash dishes. But she wanted to. And we said, "No, you got to let the youth do it."

Oh, she cried. She wanted to help do dishes.

Give her dollars. You give her a dollar bill, oh, that's huge. She's got dollars. She's saving that. The first one, she saved it by a camera. And then once she had a camera, then she was able to buy an RV.

I said, "Well, you're going to have to save a while to get a camper." But that's what she was saving her dollars for.

We've also discovered she likes to be with her age group rather than her mental level, if that makes sense. Don't put her with a bunch of five-year-olds. Put her with—like now, she likes—last year, she was old enough to be at youth camp. And she's not old enough to function by herself. But we help run the youth camp, and so we're there. And so she wants to stay in the dorm with the girls. And we did.

But yeah, she likes to be—she likes to be with her age group. Be authentic. Don't be a put-on. Genuine interest, one of our friends said. I have a friend with a child with cerebral palsy, and he's quite disabled. And he said, "People often come by and talk to their son.

They come and say hi and move on. They're being polite." And he said, "One day, he was playing volleyball, and this girl came and started talking to his son, and she didn't leave. She just stayed there with him. And she kept visiting with him and kept talking." And he said, "I got to meet this girl and see who she is.

There was something different about this girl." And so he went over there, and it was my sister who had cared for Ben. And she knew exactly all about this little boy and how the things his needs were. And there was a connection there. So I have authentic interests.

Love them in the way they like to be loved. It's different than you and I do it.

Kendra's birthday is always at Bible School in River. And that is a highlight. Last year, there was no Bible School because of COVID. And that was the worst part. She didn't get to have a birthday party at Bible School.

And our other kids didn't have birthday parties in River. But I said, "You know what? That's a joy Kendra can have." And so we have birthday parties, and it's a pretty big deal for her. And the ladies at Bible School love doing it. That's one of the highlights of Bible School.

Give direction to your children. When you have other children like that, encourage them to just go up and treat them like normal. And my sister used to bring Ben around in his wheelchair. That was huge for our children. It taught our children that this is okay.

It was actually before Kendra was born, and they learned to accept children with disabilities. But sometimes children don't know, and they gawk or they stare. That's probably kind of normal for all of us. Some of us try to do it discreetly.

But just teach your children to be kind. Kendra, it's pretty obvious when you look at Kendra that she's different. And we understand that. I have a friend whose son doesn't necessarily look different, but he also has significant delays. And his mom or his dad said sometimes he can get just brushed aside as being dumb. The other friends just like, "Well, he just doesn't know."

So be considerate. Teach your children to be considerate.

Someone said that every church needs a special needs child. And I'll go for that. It teaches the children of the church empathy. It teaches the—yeah, we know how to reach out and encourage. I see Jolene's on here this morning. There's a little boy in their church. Well, he's not a little boy anymore. He's probably a young man now. But when you go there, yeah, he's just the greatest little guy. And he likes to go out and do the chores, which means going out and chasing the steers around the steer pen. Or one year, he went out and fed all 100 of the new chicks to his dog.

Stories like that, whenever I come across those stories, I always remember those things. And every church needs someone like that. Maybe not someone who feeds chicks to the dog, but you get my point. So if God has given you a special child, know that God knows and God cares.

It's okay. And may God give you grace for the child that you have. We were at a special needs retreat one time in Pennsylvania. And there was a child there, and it was a Friday through Sunday deal. And Friday night, we went to bed, and my wife said, "Get me out of here." She said, "This is just too weird." I mean, a whole retreat with special needs. She's just like, "I can't do this." And there was one girl. She was 27. And she would go from singing to spitting at her parents and slapping them and whatever. And her parents were in their 70s.

And they're trying to care for this girl. And everybody could hear this girl. And it was very distracting. And Sunday afternoon, I went up to her dad, and I just said, "I just want to bless you. I mean, you have a really tough road here." And he said, "Oh," he says, "we're so blessed." He says, "At least our daughter can feed herself. Some people can't feed themselves. And that is such a blessing that she can feed herself."

God gave him grace to do something that I wasn't called to do. And so if God gives you a special child, He will give you grace for that. And your challenges are real, but so is God's grace. It's doable.

Take delight in them, and your family will be blessed. So in conclusion, I have a paraphrase.

Took a verse and paraphrased it. "Then shall Jesus say unto them, 'Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as you have loved one of these special ones, you have loved me.'" These are children made in God's own image. And one of the first things my wife said after she was born, she said, "Is she home safe?" And I said, "Yeah, I think she's home safe." And that's one blessing we have.

We are burdened. We can be burdened for our children. We should be burdened for our children. We have a daughter that's home safe. And that's a blessing. Turn it back over to you, Sam. Thank you, Tony. Praise the Lord for the testimony of His grace in your life in regards to this. That was a tremendous encouragement to me. Sometimes we get overwhelmed by the things that we face. I know the difficulties I've faced haven't been a lifelong commitment other than the commitment to follow Christ. But God's grace is sufficient for whatever we have. I would like to open it up to you to share any questions or comments or encouragements or whatever God has laid on your heart.

Did I hear Tony say that somebody fed 100 chicks to a dog? Did I hear that right? Yeah, you heard that right. Yep. Yep. This little boy has Down syndrome, and he just, yeah. He liked his dog, I guess, more than the chicks.

Yeah. I wasn't sure that I heard that correctly.

And I was concerned about the dog, too. I had a dog who ate baby rabbits. And basically, it killed her. And there were only about four. So I don't know if you know how the dog turned out or not.

Hopefully, the dog survived. Thank you for sharing those tips on how to relate to families with children with special needs. I never know how to approach or talk to them. I always want to go talk to the child or talk to the parents or something. But you never know if they're going to be accepting of that or if they're going to think it's strange if you see them in Walmart or something and you want to go over and talk to them. Thank you for outlining some helpful tips along those lines.

That is one thing when we were put—it felt like we were put in a new box when it was a whole nother world. And before, I cared for those children. But now I'm in that world, too. And it's a place—if you're not there, you can't go there.

But once you're there, then you can—yeah, then you can take advantage of those times. You can go up and say, "I have a daughter like that." Or there's a young man who works at—well, he's not young. He's 37, works for a lumber yard.