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Yes, we do need to hear the stories of the miracles too. God really does care, even about those people that we shudder about. Id like to tell another story of suffering of the acutest kind, if you don't mind. There were two boys born in my city to separate parents about a decade before me. It was immediately known that they were both mentally retarded. By the time they were six they were taken to a state institution five hours away. Simply because they were classified as severe MR they were together until the one man died in his 40's. We know very little about those years. Parents and family visited a couple of times a year. Home visits were harrowing and eventually stopped. The little one would cry, bang his small head against the walls, move blocks around, and occasionally cuddle with other residents. The bigger one loved to play with elastic. It has a fascination for him that remained his whole life. Instead of buying him however much elastic cord he wanted, the state employees tried to use elastic as a motivating factor to get him to do things. But he outsmarted them. When he needed a new piece he would go up behind a poor unsuspecting soul and lift the back of their underwear out of their britches, and bite off a piece. Then he'd sit contentedly for hours in his wheelchair with fingers on both ends of the elastic, boinging it back and forth. He was not born with any sense of direction. If he wanted to go out of a door to the room, he would walk into every wall in the room before he made it out of the door. He never learned to talk or wear shoes. He fell constantly and injured himself so severely that his head was many times bigger than normal . . . His scalp and face were masses of hills and valleys. They tried everything to hold him down. Restraint jackets--he would squirm his way out of. The state closed down his institution of thousands of people. Each person was to return to their county of origin. We thought we were up to the task of providing a neighborhood home for these two men. For the previous three years the institution gradually closed as people left, the easiest ones to place went first. The best and brightest employees left for new positions . . .the old and bitter ones remained. We took three months to prepare the house for them. When they arrived and the state employees left, we opened their trunks. As if was a precious antique, right on the top was a bright green straight jacket with his name embroidered on it. We gave it to this gentleman, and he took great delight in throwing it on the floor, and running his wheelchair over it. He propelled his wheelchair by rocking it in a thrusting forward motion. He lived less then a year, I made it with him about eight months before getting burnt out. He died on a mat on the floor of a nursing home, the very place we didn't want him to end up at. They never bothered to call me and tell me he died, I heard it a week later in casual conversation. The funeral was already over. Would he have lived longer in his old place? Maybe, for a few months. There was more medical treatment there . . .but look at it this way. It was a bad, bad, concept, to put five thousand men, women, and children together, all of them with severe mental illness or mental retardation. It had to close, and now nobody is there because it was the easiest thing to do. The other little man got a new roommate, and still spends his days scooting around on his bottom, moving cardboard blocks across the room.
Don't know if anyone made it through all of this. Except to say, a bad concept is a bad concept. Boarding schools? Some missions?
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