The Key

Anyone else feel like their entire existence is backwards, upside down, and inside out? My earliest memory is watching children laugh and play, so freely, so naturally, and thinking: how do they do that? Who gave them the rule book to life, and where do I find mine?

That question became my quest. Long before I understood why, I was drawn to the ones who never got the rule book either. I spent decades chasing the magic key. Accolades. Success. Praise. Waiting for something to finally fill the gap. It never did. Because worldly accolades don't solve a spiritual riddle.

Last summer I went through the fall of Babel. I knew it was coming. I sat in my car and heard it clearly: the tower is coming down. A few weeks later, it did. My entire life split open. Fire poured out, along with some proverbial milk and honey. Through involuntary surrender I finally stopped fighting and started listening. One step at a time, no map, no destination. For the first time I truly let go, because I had no choice if I wanted to live. And God provided manna for every single step.

What came out the other side: the knowing had always been there. I had just put her to sleep for forty years.

The gap you've always felt — the one that made you wonder if you were built wrong for this world — that gap isn't a flaw. It's where the key is found.

April is Autism Awareness Month. I'll be honest. I have a complicated relationship with that phrase. Awareness. As if the families living this haven't been aware every single morning when they navigate a world that wasn't built for their child. As if the kids who feel everything too loudly, too deeply, too much needed more people to be aware of them.

What they need is for the world to be different.

Here's what I've come to believe. Not as a talking point, but as a conviction I would stake my life on:

What the world calls a disorder, God calls a design.

The nervous system that picks up frequencies others can't hear. The mind that won't stop until it finds the pattern underneath the pattern. The child who feels injustice like a physical wound because something in them knows it matters. These are not malfunctions. These are not tragedies wrapped in a diagnosis code.

These are people who were wired for a different kind of seeing.

The systems we inherited — the schools, the schedules, the social scripts, the metrics for what a "successful" child looks like — were not designed with them in mind. And so we call them the problem. We medicate the sensitivity. We extinguish the stimming. We teach masking so early and so well that by adulthood, many of them have completely buried the self that was always there.

I think about the builders of Babel. So certain of their architecture. So committed to one way of building, one language, one tower. And God looked at it and said: this is not the design.

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The families I walk alongside are not living a lesser life. They are living a harder one, often because the world refuses to make room. But I have watched these children, these young people, these adults who were never given the rule book. I have watched them access something that the "typical" world largely cannot. A rawness. A presence. A refusal to pretend.

That is not a deficit. That is a gift the rest of us desperately need.

To every family navigating an IEP, a meltdown in a grocery store, a birthday party your child wasn't invited to, a diagnosis that felt like a door closing instead of one opening…

You are not behind. You are not broken. You have not failed your child. You are raising someone the world is not yet ready for. And that has always been the loneliest, most sacred assignment there is.

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This month, I'm not asking you to raise awareness. I'm asking you to raise your eyes. Look at what's actually in front of you. Not the diagnosis. Not the deficit model. Not the gap between your child and the imaginary average child someone invented.

Look at who is actually there.

Because I promise you, if you look long enough, without the noise of everyone else's expectations, you will see something extraordinary.

You always could.