Cluster Cuss

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” Luke 21:33 NIV

My son uses movies on DVD a lot. He never watches full movies though. He uses scene selection to find and watch scenes that mean something to him. He will then record specific lines from those scenes on his iPad and listen to those lines an infinite number of times. He has literally thousands of lines recorded and can pull them up as he needs them. I have seen him listen to those in English, Spanish and German among others. I think it is his way of trying to figure out spoken language. He wrestles with it. He would be considered as having low verbal skills, but he surrounds himself with it. I think it helps him organize some of the thoughts going on in that beautiful and complex mind of his.

One of my favorites is from “The Fabulous Mr. Fox”. In it they replace all cuss words with the word “Cuss”. In other words “You scared the cuss out of us!” Or my personal favorite “This is going to be one giant cluster cuss for all of us.” My wife and I found ourselves using that line. In the last two days we had one giant cluster cuss in our house. The computer Korbin sometimes uses to screen these scenes crashed. It had our Quickbooks and business information on it. Neither of us were immediately concerned with that. We both knew this was going to be cuss.

I took the computer to a local vendor. He assured me that the computer was in fact on its last breath. I agreed to purchase a new one with a plea to retrieve as much information as he could, but really could he just do it quickly. My wife and I both knew it was going to be a long day. Turned out to be a long two days. We assured Korbin we would get the new computer the next day. He kept “verifying” this information. Probably 1,000 times. I watched him walk around with tears in his eyes. I watched him struggle through the day. I saw him just sit in his room holding movies. This is not the case of a kid who simply likes watching movie scenes. This was a young man whose organizational structure had been erased. My stress level was up. My wife’s stress level was up. Korbin was not good. It was a cuss of a day.

When the new computer arrived we cautiously told him after making sure it worked. We watched as he slowly gained confidence that his ability to interact with words was in fact restored. My wife and I shared a high five and took a deep breath for the first time in two days. Korbin has been fine since. He is walking around the house as I type listening to people express themselves freely while he is still unable to do so.

It strikes me that as frustrating as this was for us, how selfish it is of me to think how frustrating it was for me. What about him? This had a profound impact on his sanity. His peace was compromised and I think my son’s greatest gift is his peace. We were also reminded that for years he was like this 22 hours a day. He slept the other two hours. He has had an ongoing battle with interaction in this world his entire life. The strides he has made are miraculous. This was a great reminder for us of just how close to the edge he is forced to live and of how thankful we are for progress.

I wonder if God looks at me with the same perspective. If something is not going well how undone do I become? He obviously knows the outcomes better than I do and I doubt if God gets frustrated like I did. I am sure progress has been made in my faith walk but I get frustrated at times when I think I should have “arrived”. My effort to communicate with Him often is tangled in the distractions of this world.

What gets you frustrated?

What do you do to re-organize your effort to communicate with Him when its disrupted?

Challenge: Get back to your spiritual or relational basics if needed. Change your surroundings if needed. Communicate.

Rick Claiborn