Why was our son born with Down syndrome?

Clichés and abstractions go hand-in-hand.  So long as we keep things abstract and theoretical, we can keep offering up clichés and pleasant platitudes to explain the difficulties and tragedies of life.    

God has a wonderful plan.  You just need to trust Him.

You know, God works everything for the good. 

God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.   

It’s when tragedies hit home that our clichés stop working.  It’s when we move from the abstract and theoretical to the concrete and specific that our clichés and platitudes are found wanting.  They simply don’t work.  Saying that God has a wonderful plan and that everything works for the good sounds good as a theory, but it’s hurtful and harmful when you consider the two-year-old starving in Africa without parents.  Platitudes work when applied to world hunger as a global problem, but not when you look at the starving child.  Our theology either needs to work within the concrete realities of life or we need to re-examine our theology.     

So let’s deal with a specific, concrete situation.

Josie and I welcomed our third son this past October, a beautiful boy named Griffin.  About two hours after Griffin was born, a team of doctors informed us that he has Down syndrome.  Down syndrome is a concrete and specific reality for us.  It’s real.  We are living into this new reality every day.  And questions abound.  Why did this happen?  Why doesn’t God change it?  How we answer such questions says a lot about how our theology works out practically.   

Many people have offered up their own theological explanations. 

They wouldn’t couch their comments as theological explanations per se, but their statements are loaded with theological implications.  Let me give you the two most frequent comments we’ve received, both of which, I believe, are well intentioned and stated with purity and love but are ultimately misleading.

God gives special children to special parents. 

The basic reasoning at play here is that there is something special about Josie and me that would warrant God giving us a child with special needs.  The intent behind this comment seems to be one of encouragement, but it’s ultimately problematic.  For one, it shifts the focus to something about Josie and me that would warrant receiving a special child.  In other words, it’s about us and not about our son.  The other thing is that it cracks under the pressure of other considerations.  Most children diagnosed with Down syndrome, for example, are aborted.  So if it is the case that God gives special kids because they have special parents, why would so many of these special parents abort their special kids?  Something doesn’t add up here.  Lastly, and I am just speaking for myself, having a child with special needs doesn’t feel all that special.  It feels more like you’ve joined a club where people avoid becoming members.  Just saying. 

God gave you this child to teach you patience and a new set of values.

The basic reasoning here is that God specifically intended the challenges associated with raising a child with special needs to be an instrument of instruction and learning in my life.  As an over-achieving perfectionist, for example, I will be challenged to let go of attaching worth to achievement or perfection.  I will learn to embrace Griffin in his imperfection and see his worth apart from his achievement.  The intent behind this comment, once again, seems to be one of encouragement.  You are going to learn so much from this little one.  But the statement raises some troubling questions?  Like really, did God have to create a child with an extra chromosome to teach us patience or how to value things apart from achievement?  Aren’t there more constructive and less twisted ways to learn the same lessons?

In the end, the underlining problem with both of these statements, as well intentioned as they are, is that they confuse intent with result.  And, in so doing, they overstep their bounds.  They say way too much. 

Notice that both statements try to define the reason, God’s reason, for us being given a child with Down syndrome.  God gives special children to special parents.  God gave you this child to teach you.  But are these really God’s reasons or just possible outcomes of having a child with special needs?  More specifically, are either of these really the reason we have Griffin?  Does Griffin have an extra chromosome because Josie and me are super special people?  Does Griffin have mental retardation so that we can learn patience?  And, perhaps most importantly, is God really the agent of Griffin’s Down syndrome? 

My own answers to these questions will not satisfy others. 

Then again, many answers other people give I find incredibly unsatisfying. 

Let’s start with our picture of God. 

Is God the kind of God who causes mental retardation?  Both of the statements above assume the answer is yes, and not only yes, but yes with a purpose.  I find that hard to swallow.  We have to be careful what we ascribe to God.  For if we ascribe the brokenness and fallenness of the world to God’s purposeful intent, our understanding of God becomes pretty monstrous.  Not only that, but it becomes very unbiblical.  We’ve gone from the God who comes in flesh to redeem a broken and fallen creation, to a God that is behind the brokenness and fallenness of creation.  So no, I don’t think God causes mental retardation.  Nor do I think he needs to cause it to teach someone a lesson.  Can he use it to bring about beauty?  Yes.  And that’s what makes God good.  The goodness of God is that he can take the messy and make it beautiful.    

Let’s move onto the why. 

Why was Griffin born with Down syndrome?  The answer is that I don’t know.  And I never will.  But honestly, that doesn’t bother me.  Because the truth is that we can never know why.  I had a professor in college that once taught us a principle called The Mystery of the Eight-Second Interval.  Imagine you are standing on a bridge and you time the passing of two cars as they go by and they are exactly eight seconds apart.  Your task is to figure out why.  On a superficial level, the answer to the why question would consist of calculating the speed and distance between the cars, right?  But see, if you really wanted to know why those exact two cars were eight seconds apart at that precise moment in time, you’d have to know all the decisions both drivers made leading up to that moment.  Moreover, you’d also have to know all the variables influencing those two drivers up to that moment.  Within a few short moves, it becomes clear that you’d have to know the entire history of the world to definitively answer the why behind the eight-second interval.  And see, if we can’t answer definitely with something as trivial as an eight-second interval, what makes us think we can answer definitively when it comes to tragedy or pain or Down syndrome?

There is an arbitrary quality to life in which we never know the whys.

Why does one child survive cancer while another is defeated by cancer?  Why does one teenager die in the accident while another survives?  We don’t know.  We can’t know.  Job spends the entire book asking questions of God and never gets answers.  The only answer he gets is that the complexity of creation is beyond his grasp.  Life is arbitrary and random.  The fact that you were born in the U.S. as opposed to Guinea is largely arbitrary.  You didn’t choose it.  It just happened. 

Embracing that we can’t know the why is perhaps the hardest but most freeing step.  It’s hard because we don’t like things we can’t choose, especially bad things.  Believing that we can choose what happens to us allows us to feel in control.  Accepting that life is arbitrary feels scary and threatening.  And so many people run from reality, believing that the way they live safeguards them from tragedy.  If I go to church every week, do my Bible devotions faithfully, and tithe a percentage of my income, bad things won’t come my way.  Faithfulness to God, it is assumed, guarantees protection from the brokenness of the world.  But what happens if none of those things can truly protect us from the arbitrary nature of this broken world, as in the case of Job?  The answer, I believe, leads to freedom and faith. 

It leads to freedom because you give up control (or at least the illusion of control).  It leads to faith because you have to trust God with outcomes irrespective of whatever may come your way.    

I don’t think God created Griffin because Josie and I are super special people or to teach us a lesson.  In fact, I don’t think Down syndrome was God’s design for Griffin.  I think Griffin has Down syndrome because when his cells reproduced, they made a third copy on the 21^st chromosome and that’s what happens in a broken world.  A broken world involves kids with mental retardation.  God doesn’t need to orchestrate tragedy when a broken world already provides it.  And now that it’s here, now that it’s real and concrete and specific, God will teach us patience.  And he will teach us to love more purely, apart from achievements or accomplishments or good looks.  And all of that will be the result of God’s goodness, turning the messy into a masterpiece.