The night we came home from the hospital with Penny...

I'm headed to Chicago tomorrow to speak at the Bethesda Institute's Summer Institute on Theology and Disability. They asked me to write a blogpost to introduce some of the thoughts I'll be sharing on Wednesday. I wrote:

When our daughter Penny was diagnosed with Down syndrome shortly after birth, I discovered that I had unwittingly believed two lies. One, that our identity arises from our abilities, or, put another way, that who we are is determined by what we can do. And two, that if we fall into the category "disabled," we don't have much to offer.

Penny's diagnosis came with two guarantees, according to the doctors: she would have low muscle tone and mental retardation. She was? would be? disabled. And since I had always believed (even though I wouldn't have said I believed it) that identity comes from ability, I thought I no longer knew who my daughter was. And because I had also assumed my identity as her mother arose from her abilities, I also thought I no longer knew who I was. And so I lay in a hospital bed holding my daughter, my beautiful daughter with long eyelashes and pouty lips and a full head of dark hair, and I felt as though I had been set adrift in open water.

And yet I did know who she was. I knew she was ours—that her cheeks came from me and her lips from her dad. I knew she was named for her grandmother. I was scared my love for her might fade away, that her disability would somehow make it seep out of me over time. But I also knew, as my body began to wake up to the reality of becoming a mother, that for the time being my heart was full with fierce and protective love. She belonged to us. And I knew that she didn't really belong to us because she belonged to God.

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