Review of Freedom, Healing for Parents of Disabled Children by Nancy Douglas
Posted by Anthony on June 30, 2008
A review of Nancy Douglas’s Freedom: Healing for Parents of Disabled Children (Buy from Amazon)
In the pages of Freedom, Nancy Douglas candidly shares the pain, grief, and trials of having a disabled child. From the initial storm of discovering her daughter was Autistic, deaf, and Failure to Thrive, to the agony of knowing she would never receive physically healing, her compelling and honest account of life with a special needs child will transform the heart of all who read it. Walk with Nancy through the pages of her journey and discover for yourself the true and lasting freedom God has waiting for you!
- Paperback: 228 pages
- Publisher: Nancy Douglas (February 18, 2008)
- ISBN-10: 0615188222
- ISBN-13: 978-0615188225
- Webpage: www.oliveleafministries.com
Nancy Douglas was looking forward to the birth of her daughter. It didn’t take long to realize that something was horribly wrong. After the dust had settled, she found that she was bound up in a conflicting mess of uncertainty, fear, guilt, and grief. Her daughter could not be healed: Nancy Douglas would not be healed. Yet twenty years later she has emerged from the worst and is now in a position to share her experiences so that others might find healing- and freedom- sooner.
As the parent of a disabled child myself, I could resonate with much of what Mrs. Douglas wrote about. There were somethings about her experiences that were different for my wife and I but there were others that were very similar. I believe that this book will be well suited for the Christian parents of a disabled child where the parents struggle to cope even years later. This book is proof positive that skeptics and atheists are not the first or only ones to struggle with the problem of pain and suffering. Quite possibly, even those who are not believers but are the parents of disabled children will be able to relate to her candid discussion about her long time struggle with God… and see that God is waiting to help them, too.
The strongest chapter, in my opinion, is chapter three, which is titled “Good Grief.” She explains that someone doesn’t have to die in order for another to experience grief. This is absolutely true. I know that my wife and I endured a long period of what can only be appropriately described as grief, though what had died was not the child, but the whole host of expectations that were dashed when we learned our child would be disabled. While we have overcome most of the outright grief, there are still shooting pains when we realize that our child will never dance, play soccer, or climb a tree. Or at least, if these things happen, they will happen in a radically transformed way. However, as Mrs. Douglas points out, there is a ‘good’ grief which makes you stronger and more resilient, and what makes it ‘good’ is not the degree of the event but rather the attitude one adopts in and through it.
