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David and Mercedes Rizzo ponder the various seasons they have experienced in three decades of parenting four children, including one with special needs.


It’s been a hot summer season in New Jersey. In fact, it seems hard to remember a hotter one. We’ve shared before about a summer thirty years ago when we took our first baby to the beach on a brutally hot Fourth of July weekend. He was just three months old, and he cried and cried. As new parents it was something of a shock for us to discover that having kids was a whole new ball game, that we had now moved into a new and unpredictable season of our lives where we were not in control anymore. That summer might have been as hot as this one.  

Fortunately, over time we learned to take the changing seasons of life as they come and go. We’ve learned to savor them, looking forward to the refreshing breezes that sooner or later came our way. We’ve found that the seasons come and go, and all things manifest in their own time. The author of Ecclesiastes may have said it best: 

There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. (Ecclesiastes 3:1) 

 

Seasons of parenting  

There have been a lot of seasons in our family’s life. We have four children. When our third child Danielle came along, she brought with her a different kind of season. Danielle has autism and is non-verbal. She has at times been our greatest challenge, sometimes like a monsoon or even a tornado. But with the grace of God she has also been our greatest teacher, the joy of our hearts and the hearts of her brothers and sister.  

 

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There have been plenty of days when pelting rains and fierce winds have made us question God’s plan for our lives. There have even been the false promises of the hurricane’s eye, when bright sun and an eerie calm explode once again into gale force winds and torrential rain. Yet the storms always end and they come much further apart, and with considerably less intensity these days.

We marvel when we see how much Danielle has grown as a person. She is involved in life. She is reverent and participates in Mass, receives Holy Communion, and has a profound sense of love and joy. We can’t help but think that she experiences God more directly and powerfully than we do. She continues to bear great fruit in all of our lives and in the lives whom she has touched just by being the person God means her to be.  

 

Making peace with changing seasons 

Overall, we have made our peace with the changing seasons, and seen how God was acting in our lives all along and knows best. The seasons God sends have turned out to be the right seasons after all. 

 

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Today, we are at a lovely beach town at the Jersey shore. There is a delightful breeze coming off the ocean. The muffled roar of waves collapsing and making their way upward on the sand with the smell of sea salt is positively invigorating. Further up, dunes stretch in a long line. The gentle wind causes the grasses to billow and undulate like waves.  

For whatever the reason, God in His wisdom has established such cycles and seasons, to give us hope perhaps that the cycles and seasons of our lives bring both terror and relief.  

 

In his Book of Hours the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke has written,  

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror 
Just keep going. No feeling is final. 
Don’t let yourself lose me.  

Nearby is the country they call life. 
You will know it by its seriousness.  

Give me your hand. (Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows) 

 

Our family continues to discover the truth of these lines. We encounter beauty, terror and everything else that God presents to us. Life is an arising and a passing away of seasons. We move through this country called life, and it is serious indeed. Fortunately, God stretches out His abundant hand for all of us to grasp. 

 

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Copyright 2024 David and Mercedes Rizzo
Images: copyright 2024 David and Mercedes Rizzo, all rights reserved.