My husband’s band, Harken, has a couple of music videos posted on YouTube, but they were hard to find via the search engine so I’m posting them below for easy access. Both videos were recorded at the same event, Hosanna Palooza, an outdoor Christian music and craft festival that apparently occurs the same day as the Telegraph Dream Cruise (we ate at a restaurant after the concert along the Cruise route & had awesome views of some of the Motor City’s great Classic Cars that evening…what a treat!)
image from this page: http://jobbiecrew.com/6th-annual-tele-car-cruise/
The day this concert happened temps got up over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the guys were at the music festival for several hours before playing. It was truly by God’s grace that none of us suffered any heat exhaustion. This was a special day for our family for it was the first time All of our kids were able to see their dad’s band play with their new lead singer. This was such a God honoring event and a privilege to participate as a support to our family’s version of a “Motor City Mad Man”–my husband, Michael, the bass player.
He is an amazing man who has lived a life of sacrificial love before our family, friends, and colleagues. God has gifted him in so many ways yet he remains humble, joyful, and playful as he lives out his faith daily in the crucible that Special Needs Parenting (& Marriage) can be. Thank you, Lord, for blessing me with a Godly man to love, laugh with, and live this crazy, amazing life alongside! “A three-strand cord is not easily broken”– that would be a husband, wife, & the Lord in the center of their marriage!
And if one person is vulnerable to attack, two can drive the attacker away. As the saying goes, “A rope made of three strands is not quickly broken.” Biblegateway.com
(the above image comes from a Google Images search for “Ecclesiastes 9:9)
The info is from the given youtube pages–note the chorus for “Your Will” is taken directly from scripture, a personal favorite aspect of many Christian songs of impact!
Psalm 40:8
New International Version (NIV)
8 I desire to do your will, my God; your law is within my heart.”
from BibleGateway.com
Published on Jul 24, 2016
Our original song Your Will recorded at Hosanna Palooza on July 23, 2016 in Redford, Michigan.
Published on Jul 23, 2016
Our original song Dose Of The Ghost recorded at Hosanna Palooza, July 23, 2016 in Redford, Michigan.
Finally, here is a link to their ReverbNation page with more band info, & audio for 6 songs.
Harken rocks Hosanna Palooza, July 23, 2016
this picture is from the band’s Facebook page here:
As an extra treat, here is the “tribute page” of his previous band, Binding Faith where their whole CD can be heard and there is video footage of another outdoor Michigan festival where this band was blessed to play, filmed by their drummer’s son…
“Chaoticness!”
Harken Bass Player, Michael Curren, at Rocktoberfest 2013
from the band’s Facebook page here:
Michael Curren & Valerie Stoddard engaged, Christmas 1991…What a Gift!
Photo from my husband’s Facebook page, our informal engagement pic from December 1991…“it’s not the years, it’s the mileage,” Indiana Jones. Here’s what Michael said there on Facebook about this picture, approaching our 20th Anniversary:
I love her twice as much as the day I met her, and I would do it all again. Bring on the next 20 years!
Curren family at Skyline Cafe, U of M Hospital, Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 2014 (left to right) Nathaniel, Brandon, Clarissa, Michael, Valerie, & Josiah
Our family 2 years ago at the University of Michigan Mott Children’s Hospital, “Skyline Cafe”, following a day of genetic testing to attempt to pinpoint diagnoses our special son, Josiah (foreground, right) might have…usually just J & I do the hospital runs…
Well, there’s lots of personal info in this posting so I’m going to be checking back here to review pictures & sounds whenever I might need just this kind of a pick-me-up.
I just read the post at the below site about the challenges one family faced surrounding church attendance…that seemed to be generated, in particular, by one church staff person being inflexible and unaccepting of their child’s unique quirkiness…
http://supportforspecialneeds.com/2016/02/10/when-church-special-needs-do-no-mix/“…we were so tired of fighting for the kids that our hearts weren’t in it to fight for this place; a place we should feel welcome no matter what. It’s exhausting fighting educationally, medically, mentally and socially and top that …We just couldn’t fight to stay in church. It shouldn’t have been, nor should it be that hard. As their parent, I take full responsibility for giving up that fight. I just couldn’t do it.”
I agree with the exhaustion statement above . Families facing complex special needs scenarios can be overwhelmed and even burned out because of the day-in and day-out battles they face on multiple fronts. Church should (theoretically) be a place where we can go and be accepted “warts and all” and where our children can be especially embraced in spite of, or even because of, their differences.
But, oftentimes church can be a battleground. There are a couple of posts at SpecialNeedsParenting.net that outline a pretty ideal scenario of love and acceptance of a very unique autistic young man in a church. Please see this story at these two links: http://specialneedsparenting.net/autism-church/ http://specialneedsparenting.net/autism-church-its-a-good-thing-part-ii/
Our family’s experience has been a bit more uneven than this. When our son with special needs was born we lived in Northern Michigan, about 3 1/2 hours North of the birth hospital. At that time I was staying with my parents in Metro Detroit with our just 2 year old son after having seen a high risk pregnancy doctor and being told of my twin pregnancy “we’ve got to get the little guy out before he dies” on a Friday, and being scheduled for a premature delivery on the Monday following. Both twins were needing to stay in the NICU before coming home. The basically “normal” baby (Brandon) came “home” (to my parents’ home) after 10 days in the NICU, but Josiah remained there for about 2 months before being transferred to the University of Michigan Hospital for Open Heart surgery.
My husband and I had been quite involved in our Northern Michigan church before becoming parents. We had been the youth leaders/pastors for a period of time and also both very active in the worship ministry. When it became known that Josiah would be having heart surgery both pastors traveled South to visit with him (and me) in his birth hospital. It was a fairly awkward visit as the senior pastor was visibly uncomfortable in the presence of this very small (about 4 pounds then, having been 2# 6oz at birth, a condition called IUGR–Intra-Uterine Growth Retardation, very small for gestational age) and sickly premature infant. They did ask how they could help our family and offered to stay with us at U of M during Josiah’s upcoming heart surgery, but I did not feel “safe” in their presence so declined this “service”. I suggested that they could have some families in the church either provide meals for my husband, or invite him over for a meal as he was living alone (in order to work) and coming downstate to be with his family each weekend. This resulted in one dinner invitation for my husband during that extended time of extreme stress and isolation.
Years later we ended up discussing that early time and how uncomfortable we were with how the senior pastor, in particular, handled us and our situation. There was something about things that never really sat right, though it was hard to pinpoint. Our friends had also been attending our church during that time and were quite close with my husband in particular (he and our oldest son had both participated in their wedding). They provided some needed perspective about how our “heart surgery baby” was being handled by our then pastor at that time. According to them he would brag about the small sick baby from his congregation, kind of like a feather in his cap about how he/the church were doing so much to “meet our needs”. Apart from that hospital visit (which was a significant drive and Not requested by us) and that one meal for my husband there was nothing done for us by our church…including during multiple surgeries and intensive home interventions from government program workers for about the next two years before we left the area. I forgot, the Senior Pastor did visit me and the boys in our home at one point, I’m not sure when, and asked what I needed. When I said that I could really use a friend he exclaimed (in seeming outrage) “I can’t get you friends!”, which wasn’t what I was actually saying. Needless to say, talking to pastors about “issues” has never been very high on my priority list (and perhaps I’m too picky in this arena given my background in Christian Counseling)…
In the early days after the twins’ birth, when we were finally all back in our own home I heard a very moving story on the local Christian Radio Station. There was a family that had given birth to a very medically fragile child and they had been surrounded by love and support from their natural and local church family. This involvement rose to the level of round the clock shifts to provide extra assistance during the early weeks, and perhaps even months, of intensive neediness. What was portrayed seemed so ideal and so far apart from our own experience that I was very saddened at that time by how unsupported we ended up feeling from our local church family (our natural family being hundreds of miles away and helping us with housing/babysitting during medically based visits).
Because of our son’s complex medical needs, which were all being treated and followed at U of M, a good 3 hours South of our then home, we began to explore the possibility of moving closer to this needed ongoing medical care. Ultimately my husband went through a job change that allowed him to work downstate and live in my parents’ home for about a year, commuting to our home for the weekends, while I stayed North with our three sons so that we could sell our home ourselves (For Sale By Owner). The boys and I would head South with their dad for any weeks where Josiah had medical appointments and return home the following weekend. This situation was extremely stressful for all involved and for the most part we had no support from our local church. I lived in extreme isolation during the weekdays, rarely leaving the house because of Josiah’s fragility and risk of infection, etc. In fact I was shocked to find out that the woman I considered my closest friend from that church had been attending a weekly bible study a few houses from my own, but she had never stopped in to see me or the kids nor to check on why we attended church so sporadically, if at all. That lack of attendance was due to the fact that Josiah contracted life-threatening RSV (Respiratory Synsichial Virus) and required lengthy hospitalizations for it twice in the first year of life–basically taking him out in public was risking his life.
When we finally accomplished moving the entire family downstate and got situated in our “new” home, we began searching for another church home. As the twins were now toddlers (2), our oldest son 4, and our daughter an infant this was an extremely challenging process. If we found a church that had sufficient nursery capacity they rarely, if ever, were able to handle the magnitude of Josiah’s behavioral or emotional needs for the duration of a worship service and either I or my husband would need to intervene with him, sometimes multiple times in one service (this was before we knew about “autism”, but even after such a diagnosis we had minimal autism treatment so it was more just an “ah ha” explanation for us about what was going on with him). This really meant very sporadic church attendance overall as it was very difficult to “get anything” out of a service being so distracted by Josiah’s needs. The magnitude of those needs was also a major reason why we sought the support and sustenance of a local church “family”, as a way to cope with the massive pressures of the special needs family’s life.
It was a number of years before we began attending our present church and we ultimately went there because it had a bit of a “comfortable old shoe” component to its ambiance for us. During Clarissa’s infancy I had attended a MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) program at that particular church and felt that it had a pretty welcoming atmosphere. Because of that positive MOPS experience, and because the church was pretty local and seemed relatively welcoming we eventually began attending more and more frequently.
Since our children were then mostly in their elementary years we were no longer battling the nursery situation. Also, this church has a fairly limited “Sunday School” type programming, so we often just kept Josiah with us during the service in order to minimize some of the upheaval. Josiah has always had a true worshiper’s heart for the Lord! This means that either in church or during times of spiritual meaningfulness (family devotions and/or communion, etc.) he was more attentive and/or more behaviorally appropriate than he might otherwise typically have been. That meant that at least sometimes he was appropriate to attend the kid’s programming, and having him included in some musical kids productions was a definite blessing.
Even though our current church home is relatively “special” friendly there are still glaring times of insensitivity that can be on display. A couple years back our daughter was nearly moved to tears while at a youth event when she observed how her special brother was not at all appropriately included in a physical activity. His processing challenges and poor coordination meant that he was rather bowled over and disregarded during a sporting event. Clarissa was very sad that the attending leaders were either unaware or unconcerned about how Josiah (and his sister) was being hurt by not being appropriately accommodated. It would be great if either of them would have been assertive enough to speak up and seek help during such difficult experiences, but that is unlikely to happen. That means that people in leadership need to develop increased observational skills and sensitivity and perhaps creativity in how they reach out to people and families that are “different” and who may need extra help, patience, or understanding…
Being able to reach out and embrace kids/adults with special needs and their families really should become a primary mission of virtually any local church. The uniqueness of the needs represented would mean that staff and parishioners would need to be especially sensitive to where a given family was in multiple domains. There could be great opportunities to reach out in service to such families who often face more than their “fair share” of crises and upheavals. Having a ministry targeting special needs families could mean a much more vibrant style of community outreach and Christian witness. The love and compassion, gentleness and patience, joy and peace, kindness and self-control that Should accompany the Christian life would be the ideal characteristics for people reaching out to special families to possess. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Lord would lay such a burden on the hearts of so many in ministry?
Until such a time as that ideal scenario presents itself, those of us who know the Lord need to allow Him to move in and through us in developing eyes, ears, and hearts of compassion toward one another…and especially to people and families that are often broken and hurting. And if you come from a special needs family it is almost certain that you bear burdens and wounds and need the love and tender mercy of the Lord poured out into your life. The author referenced at the beginning of this post took a long hiatus from church and didn’t really raise her kids much in the faith. Although she herself is attempting a return to church now, it is unclear what spiritual relationship her kids have–and those losses are at least partially attributable to an incredibly insensitive church leader who by her demeanor may have inflicted permanent damage on a vulnerable family…How Tragic!
May the Lord give His wisdom to His people that they/we as individuals and as local church bodies may open their/our eyes to the many needs around them/us represented by special needs families. May they/we choose to see and to give of themselves/ourselves in time, prayer, emotional support, or tangible means of assistance and so reach out to so many of the vulnerable, lonely, hurting, and fragile within our communities. Consider the Randy Stonehill song () below which beautifully portrays the need for each of us to be Christ’s hands and feet to a hurting world…Blessings to All, Valerie
RANDY STONEHILL Who Will Save The Children Lyrics
Cry for all the innocent ones Born into a world that’s lost its heart For those who never learn to dream Because their hope is crushed before it can start And we shake our fists at the air And say “If God is love, how can this be fair?”
But we are his hands, we are his voice We are the ones who must make the choice And if it isn’t now, tell me when? If it isn’t you, then tell me who Will save the children? Who will save the children?
We count our blessings one by one Yet we have forgotten how to give It seems that we don’t want to face All the hungry and homeless who struggle to live But heaven is watching tonight Tugging at our hearts to do what’s right
And we are his hands, we are his voice We are the ones who must make the choice And if it isn’t now, tell me when? If it isn’t you, then tell me who Will save the children? Who will save the children?
As we observe then through our T.V. screens They seem so distant and unreal But they bleed like we bleed And they feel what we feel
Oh, save the children Save the children Save the children
Now we decide that nothing can change And throw up our hands in numb despair And we lose a piece of our souls By teaching ourselves just how not to care But Christ would have gone to the cross Just to save one child from being lost
And we are his hands, we are his voice We are the ones who must make the choice And it must be now There’s no time to waste it must be you No one can take your place Can’t you see that only we Can save the children Save the children Save the children Please, save the children Will save the children? Who will save the children?
Lyrics taken from: http://www.elyrics.net/read/r/randy-stonehill-lyrics/who-will-save-the-children-lyrics.html
I have basically been “just a mom” for a long time now…my youngest just turned 18 and my oldest hit 22 near the end of 2015. However the even bigger adjustment than to life in mommyland came when our twins were born 20 years ago…and one of them had significant and complex special needs. The disabilities and medical conditions and multifaceted needs really transformed my life from “just” being a “stay-at-home-mom” to a mom of 4 (eventually) and one with significant health and other needs. I became a “Special Needs Mom” and we became a “Special Needs Family”. In addition 2 of my other kids, youngest & oldest, and my husband have been “officially” diagnosed with ADHD, while the other 2 family members have numerous ADHD traits, so our house is always hoppin’!
Over the years the magnitude of the tasks before me and the extreme isolation I’ve experienced (some of which is self-inflicted) have meant that I have become overwhelmed by responsibilities, complex decision-requiring scenarios, my need to “process” things in a safe and responsive space, historical hurts that have impeded my progress or even ability to seek support from others, the sheer volume of conditions impacting our son’s life (as in there doesn’t ever seem to be anyone out there to whom I can really relate), the craziness of the schedule of a 6 person family and attendant duties (sports, academic, therapeutic, & relational support, etc), and having to occasionally address my own needs to try to avoid or overcome burnout. Being a parent, and a special needs parent in particular, has intruded upon (and sometimes overshadowed) my marriage and other relationships. It can easily become an all-consuming vocation.
Now that all my kids are adults, in looking back on their childhood years I hope and pray that they can come to a place of forgiveness for me (just as I need to be able to forgive myself), for all the ways that I let them down in numerous arenas of what a mom is “supposed” to be and do. I’ve thought of my experience in parenting Josiah, in particular, to being akin to the scriptural shepherd leaving the flock (the 99) to go looking for the one lost sheep. So many times and ways Josiah has strayed from the family flock and has required me to go after him, to find a way to bring him home, and to help him learn how to interact with all the other sheep to some degree. Where I feel guilty, in part, is for whenever my husband and other kids have basically been amongst the 99 whom I’ve yet again left “alone” to go pursue that (same) one lost sheep.
Here’s a scripture that my husband shared with me years ago, and which gives me comfort:
The fact that God “gently leads” those with young means that he has patience and understanding for the plight of parents. We parents are split beyond just addressing our own needs, we have to also care for the needs of our young, and the Lord understands this. It’s sometimes hard for me to think of the gentleness of the Lord, for some examples of fatherhood lived out before me seem to stray more into arenas of harshness and criticism, so it’s important to take such scripture to heart and at face value, for me.
When we are in Christ’s Kingdom, part of His Flock, then we are those very lambs that He gathers “in his arms and carries…close to His heart”! He deals with us in tenderness and mercy, love and compassion, gentleness and patience, carrying us when we cannot carry ourselves nor our own burdens. This is especially true of those of the flock who also have young and those of us tasked with caring for another’s needs, like when our children are very young or when their disabilities and/or fragilities require our involvement more to the degree of what is typical for a younger, needier, more vulnerable child than chronological age alone might indicate.
Thank you, Lord, that you remember that we are “dust” and that we need You to lead us Gently…especially when we are responsible for our young. Thank You for placing this simple passage in your Word and giving your Holy Spirit to make it come alive in our lives. Please continue to lead, guide, and direct my life (and that of my family and you dear readers who share this prayer) and to do so in gentleness, carrying each of us close to Your Heart! In Jesus’ Precious Name, Amen…
The above image is copied from this article, well worth the read:
Special Connections 