I have Tourette syndrome.
It’s a gift.
I have it on good authority that we all have gifts. When you see someone living out their gifting, you know it. You smile and nod because you are witnessing the marriage of earth and heaven, of hard work and divinely inspired inclination, and who doesn’t like a wedding?
Yep, some gifts are marvelous to behold.
Others come like uninvited guests. I tell you, Tourette’s was definitely not on my guest list.
Likely different than your wedding crasher, this one causes my shoulder to leap and my hands to twitch. It also gives me a bad case of mannequin envy.
I won’t lie; sometimes it is a very painful gift.
When my youngest was not yet one, we arrived at Christmas with enough money to purchase one small gift. Three kids, one gift. The food shelf blessed us with a stuffed dog for our daughter, and we blew our wad on our oldest son, which left us nothing for our one-year old.
But in the rafters, we had a box. A large, cardboard box. We wrapped it up, and presented it to our babe filled with nothing but love. He tore at that wrap, laughing, shouting.
“It’s a little house for you,” I said. He smiled and crawled in. He cried and came back out. Dad (that’s me) had forgotten to check for staples. My son was a little scratched, I was a lot sorry, but soon all was put right, the staples were gone, and he played with that painful box for two years.
When he was three, he needed a box that could hold a gift for his brother.
“Let’s use my house,” he said. And we did.
It didn’t stop there.
His painful gift carried my lovely’s dishes into our new home.
His painful gift was the birthplace of five little kittens.
His painful gift, hardly recognizable, now catches the drops of oil that fall from my van.
But that’s what painful gifts do. If they are true gifts, they rarely leave. These severe mercies touch you, wound you, mark you in ways only they can. Suddenly, sometimes violently, they change the trajectory of your life, and then, if you’re willing to give them away, they change those around you.
And so, I would like to give you a gift … I’d like to share my severe mercy:
I have Tourette syndrome.
And if we ever meet, I hope you are blessed by the strange, messy, wondrous disorder I possess. I hope you smile and feel right at home, and a little more at peace with whatever painful gifts crashed your party.