Elrena Evans
11 min read ⭑
“Written prayers are an integral part of my faith tradition as an Episcopalian. But as we were beginning our ‘special needs’ journey, I found myself wondering: Where is the prayer for a diagnosis? For special education? For being on hold for an hour with your insurance company or for receiving the wrong diagnostic code on a form? So I started to write those prayers.”
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?
My favorite food is always ice cream. And though I’ve loved ice cream in many places, at many times, and in many seasons, if I had to pick one favorite place for the sweet frozen treat, it would probably be Kohr Brothers in Ocean City, New Jersey, where I’ve vacationed almost every summer since I was a teenager.
I love ice cream—in part because I love to celebrate but also because it’s ice cream. Celebration has always run deep in my veins; I find any and every excuse to celebrate. And I seem to have passed this trait on to all five of my children. In our family, we celebrate joys and triumphs, and we celebrate what can feel like failures or setbacks. We celebrate because, even in the darkest seasons, still there is light: the light of Christ, the light of love, and the light of the neon sign at Dairy Queen.
When I broke my foot one summer a few years ago, we got a cake that said “Congratulations on breaking your foot!” When my oldest son then managed to break his foot a few weeks later, we got an ice cream cake (ice cream!) that said “Congratulations on breaking your foot, too!”
So whether we finally got all of the laundry sorted and put away or we made it 19 days into the school year before a phone call from the special education teacher about “behavioral concerns,” or just because we’re alive and that’s a good thing, let’s get ice cream! Let’s celebrate!
Alexandre Tsuchiya; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?
I love to dance. I’ve danced my entire life, training in classical ballet and then branching out to modern, folk, lyrical, contemporary—pretty much anything that moves rhythmically to music. Dance—and more broadly, movement—is part of what grounds me.
I was fortunate to find a liturgical dance choir at a local church when I was 11 years old, and I’ve been dancing with them now for 33 years. (Yup, you can do the math there!) Through the opportunity to connect my dancing with my faith, I’ve learned that dancing is often what sustains my faith. When I dance, I feel God’s breath in my lungs. And in times of doubt or despair, in the dry seasons of my faith, I still find that I feel God’s presence when I dance.
Being a bit of a nerd, I started reading several years ago on the nature of the brain to try and understand this connection I feel between faith and movement. And what I think I learned is that when I dance, I can bypass the stumbling blocks my cerebral cortex sets to trip me up—my doubts, fears, and questions. When I dance, instead of approaching God through logic and analysis, I can surrender solely to the existence of movement—to my motor cortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum. Stripped of the need to ask “how” and “why,” I can experience God’s presence in a different way. And when I dance, my body remembers what it feels like to believe.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?
It’s hard for me to ask for help. Putting myself in a position where I feel vulnerable makes me feel physically sick, like the way it feels to know you’ve caught the stomach flu. And I greet the two—feeling vulnerable and having the stomach flu—with about equal enthusiasm.
When a broken foot turned out to be a “complicated injury” that landed me in a fracture boot for 10 weeks, during most of which I was non-weight-bearing, it was ... hard. Kind strangers would open the door when they saw me rolling over on my knee scooter with five children (the youngest of whom was 2 at the time) in orbit around me. And yet I would have to take a deep breath so that I wouldn’t respond, “I’m fine. I can do it myself.”
Then my middle son’s special education teacher called to say that my son’s resistance to asking for or accepting help was playing out in the classroom in challenging ways. (I wonder where he got it from?) And because my son’s brain is just wired differently in many ways, his refusal to accept help further complicated things.
I don’t fully understand the wiring of my son’s brain, but I do understand a reluctance to ask for help. So I started asking my son—who was 6 at the time—to help me. Help me open the door, help me get my shoes, and help me find a pillow to elevate my foot.
“I hate this,” I would say, conversationally. “I don’t like asking for help and I would rather do everything all by myself.” And when my son looked at me, I saw that we were connecting. He understood—absolutely—how very hard it was to do this thing, and he also saw that it didn’t kill me. I didn’t like it, but I was okay. It’s okay to ask for help and accept help even if we hate it. We can still be okay.
I think this will probably be a life-long challenge for both of us, but who knows? Our lives aren’t over yet, and our God is a God of wonders.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?
When my middle son was 5 and in kindergarten, he was asked to leave the Christian school that he and his siblings attended. This led to an evaluation, A diagnosis, and enrollment in special education at a different school a few months later. Although the entire process, years later, fits neatly into two sentences, at the time, it felt like my entire world was fracturing.
Written prayers are an integral part of my faith tradition, as an Episcopalian. But as we were beginning our “special needs” journey, I found myself wondering, Where is the prayer for a diagnosis? For special education? For being on hold for an hour with your insurance company or for receiving the wrong diagnostic code on a form?
So I started to write those prayers. And it grew from there. A thanksgiving for sign language. A blessing for a new wheelchair. Prayers for public scenes and sleepless nights, new aides and therapy animals. Prayers for IEP (Individualized Education Program) meetings, and more IEP meetings, and still more IEP meetings. Prayers for hope, for comfort, for joy.
Special Grace: Prayers and Reflections for Families with Special Needs, published by InterVarsity Press, is for anyone who parents or loves a child with special needs. So often, this path can feel frustrating and isolating, and so often, we feel we don’t even have words. At those moments when the cries of our hearts leave us speechless, my hope is that Special Grace can provide us with words to bring to the One who made us, who made our child, who called us to this path, and who will give us the grace that we need.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
I joke that I know the Holy Spirit is working in my life when I start crying.
I’m a bit of a crier, as those close to me will tell you. My feelings tend to find their way into the corners of my eyes. Not too long ago, my family was watching a movie together, and just as the plot reached a bittersweet turn, my middle son said, “And Mom starts crying!”
“I do not,” I responded.
“Not yet,” my son continued. “In about five seconds. Five... four... three... two... one.”
He was right, of course, and soon my nose was tickling with the unmistakable foretelling of tears, even as I laughed along with him.
I know I’m doing the work God has called me to do when my nose tickles, and I feel like I’m going to cry. I think of the line from the movie Chariots of Fire, the one everyone quotes (and for good reason!): “When I run, I feel his pleasure.” When my nose tickles with tears, I feel God’s pleasure and the affirmation of doing the work that I know he has called me to do.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it, which spiritual practice is workin’ best for you right now?
My current favorite spiritual practice is the practice of memorization. Memorizing Scripture, yes, but also prayers and poetry. In a world where we so often read something once and move on, never to return, I find that the practice of returning over and over again until the words can echo in my brain of their own accord brings me both focus and peace.
Poetry, especially, has been a faithful companion lately. I’ve memorized Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers,” as well as two poems by Jan Richardson, and I’m currently working on Ross Gay’s “Sorrow is not my name.” As I recite the words, first in small groups of lines and phrases and then expanding into stanzas, I feel the rhythms in my body. Words I’ve memorized become more visceral to me; they feel like they live in my body in a different way. And I feel God’s presence when I commit words to memory in much the same way as I do when I dance.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources—lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are some resources that have impacted you?
Earlier this year, I decided to try my hand at gardening. Despite being wildly in love with God’s created world and adoring the great outdoors, I’ve never been a gardener. In part, what kept me out of the garden was fear—fear of messing up, of getting it wrong, and of having absolutely no idea what I’m doing. Fear that my starting point was so low as to be beyond help.
But nothing is beyond the reach of grace.
Several years ago, I was gifted a garden bed, and in the intervening years, whatever has found its way there has grown, flowers and weeds alike. This year, armed with my trusty (or not-so-trusty) plant identification app, I sallied forth into my “garden” with my children to try to start by just identifying which ones were the weeds.
I soon realized I was, as feared, in over my head. Plants with beautiful names on my plant app, like “longleaf groundcherry” or “greenstem forsythia,” turned out to be weeds. I didn’t know what to do. I needed help.
My dear friend and fellow writer Christie Purifoy is the founder and host of the Black Barn Garden Club, an online community of gardeners that is about so much more than just gardening. It’s also about tending the places where God has called us to be as “placemakers” in this world. It’s about finding hints and whispers of God’s grace, even in the weeds.
I sent Christie an email, asking if the Garden Club could be for someone like me. Someone who really knows ... nothing.
And it was. In the Garden Club, I found a community where no question was too small and no weed too annoying. We dig in the dirt together, tending the places God has called us to be and listening for whispers of grace.
We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season—and tell us what it’s done for you.
My indispensable resource this season is a “prayer walk.” It’s just a simple daily walk with one seemingly small caveat—I take my walks completely unplugged. No podcasts, no music, nothing in my ears. Nothing to distract me from being fully present in God’s created world.
Being present in and of itself feels like a prayer.
Walking unplugged allows me to tune in to other things. To the created world, to the thoughts in my brain, to the sensations in my body as I walk. I notice the feeling of my feet connecting with the earth. I notice where in my body I’m holding tension. I visualize the intercostal muscles between my ribs expanding and contracting as I breathe. And in all of this, I pray. Sometimes with words, sometimes with movement, and sometimes simply with my breath.
I’ve been a Star Trek fan for much of my life, and I’ve always been a bit entranced by the Vulcan mind-meld: “My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts.” I think of this phrase as I walk sometimes—not in a science-fiction sense but truly as a prayer to God: My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts.
As Paul wrote, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5, NKJV).
QUESTION #8: dream
God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
I’m really excited about my next book, a picture book for children called When I Go to Church, I Belong (InterVarsity Press). Told from the perspective of six children as they go to church and find that they are welcome there, the book tells a story of what inclusion can look like for those who have different abilities.
I’m excited about this book because I’m passionate about advocating for children who have special needs, especially in our places of worship. I feel we are most fully the body of Christ—the body that God has called us to be—when we extend welcome to all.
Beyond that, most of my musings and scribblings lately seem to revolve around foster care and being a foster child. And I’m terrified because that isn’t something I usually talk about. But I’m trying to follow this path where I feel I’m being led.
Around one in nine children under 18 in the U.S. receive special education services. Those millions of children have unique needs and abilities—and each one deserves to be heard and seen.
But what about at church? Do children with special needs—and their families—feel heard and seen there? Do they feel welcomed and loved? Do they regularly see a tangible picture of Jesus’ compassion and acceptance?
For families with children who have special needs, life doesn’t always feel “normal.” But as Christians, we aren’t called to normal, are we? We’re called to radical love—and maybe that starts with reaching out to a family and asking, “How can we make you feel more welcome here?”
Elrena Evans (MFA, Penn State) is the executive editor of Paper&String, a digital care package celebrating faith, creativity, and beauty in its many forms. She is the author of Special Grace: Prayers and Reflections for Families with Special Needs, the short story collection This Crowded Night, and coauthor of the essay collection Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life. She enjoys spending time with her family, dancing, and making spreadsheets.
