Praying for Micah's speech

This past Monday Micah had an EEG followed by an appointment with Dr. Raja. The great news is that the EEG revealed no seizure activity. He hasn’t had the horrible infantile spasms (which he had since 4 months old) since last April of 2007. On occasion he has some staring moments and other suspicious looks that have made us and his teacher at school wonder if he might be having what are called petit mal seizures. Anyway, so none at this point (at least none that happened during the EEG), Praise the Lord.

The appt. with Dr. Raja was fairly typical with the usual examination and questions about his development. He asked about Micah’s speech, if he had any words yet, and we said no. When we probed a little further, in terms of timing, his future development, etc., Dr. Raja said that if he has no speech by age 5, it isn’t likely he will get it because the brain is fairly set at that point when it comes to speech. My mind immediately went back to the first week of his diagnosis in August of 2005, when we asked what life would be like for Micah. Dr. Raja had said, “Oh, these kids (with Tuberous Sclerosis) walk and talk, though it’s often slow to develop.” So, needless to say, we were a bit surprised by the possibility that he might not develop speech.

This was very upsetting to me and I feel like I have been processing it all week. We have such a longing even now to communicate with Micah. We want to know what he’s thinking, what’s going on in his mind. We want to know what he’s so obsessed with outside that he stands at the sliding glass doors saying “EEEEEEEE!!” and flapping his arms for minutes at a time. We want to know what is making him so upset when there seems to be no obvious reason, as well as what makes him laugh so suddenly. I realize that even if he could say a few words right now, he probably wouldn’t be able to communicate these things to us. Yet, I never considered that he may never talk at all.

He is getting some speech therapy within his class at school, but we may be looking to get more one on one therapy for him in the near future.
What I want to ask of any of you who may read this is to consider being committed to praying for Micah to develop speech in the weeks and months to come, or however long it takes. I know many of you pray for him anyway, but it never hurts to pray for something specifically. I feel like Wayne and I have sort of lived between a tension of faith and reality. We absolutely believe God can do anything and we can and have prayed to that end for many things concerning Micah. We also believe, and have seen, that God sometimes chooses to give a “no” answer. So, we are going to pray and ask for God to do this in him with the understanding that it might not happen for reasons we may never know.

I have been reading (slowly over the past several months) “Prayer” by Philip Yancey and would highly recommend it. In a chapter called ‘Unanswered Prayer: Whose Fault?’, he says “…prayer does not work according to a fixed formula: get your life in order, say the right words, and the desired result will come. If that were true, Job would have avoided much suffering, Paul would have shed his thorn in the flesh, and Jesus would never have gone to Golgotha. Between the two questions “Does God answer prayer?” and “Will God grant my specific prayer for this sick child or this particular injustice?” lies a great pool of mystery.’