Remembering James Bruce

“Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing”
2 Corinthians 6:10 (NIV)

January and February are my two least favorite months of the year. The winter days are usually short, gray, and cold even in the South. The pace is also slower after the holidays. But the real reason is that both James Bruce’s birthday and death occurred in February. His birthdays were always hard for me.

Every year around his birthday, I reflect on some of the most important milestones in our 38-year parenting journey with James Bruce. He was two months old when I realized that our third child was very different from his older brother and sister. James Bruce was three when we received an official diagnosis; "mild mental retardation, origin unknown." He was five years old when genetic testing revealed a chromosomal anomaly. One tiny additional amount of chromosome material on Chromosome 15 meant that James Bruce was exactly the way God created him to be.  James Bruce was 9 when he received his autism diagnosis and his seizures began at age eighteen. But the one milestone that perhaps stands out greater than any other didn’t come with a diagnosis. Instead, it came with a challenge and a prayer.

For the first five years of James Bruce's life, I prayed for God to make him "normal." (We didn’t have the word “typical” back then!) One day my husband came home from work, found me sobbing uncontrollably, and wisely said, "I think we need to quit praying that God will make him normal, and start praying that God will use him for His glory." I angrily replied, "How could God ever use this?" But as my prayers changed, so did I.

Through the years God graciously answered that “God use him for Your glory” prayer in many ways that we now know and in countless ones that we don't. All of my speaking, teaching, and writing are the direct result of that prayer. So are VHHS special needs classes, Briarwood Special Connections ministries, PCA national disability conferences, and Evans children and grandchildren who truly know what it is to “speak up for the rights of the needy” (Proverbs 31:8-9). Each is a treasure of our darkness (Isaiah 45:3 NASB), not just for the lessons learned during suffering, but also for experiencing God’s amazing grace and provision that accompanied each step of faith taken. 

Anyone who ever met James Bruce, knew that he loved to sing. Music was his love language. James Bruce couldn’t carry on a decent conversation and there were deficits in his social skills, but he knew hundreds of hymns. He and his Dad watched YouTube videos and sang hymns every night before bedtime. Our family has laughed over the last four years and said we bet his first words in heaven were “Let’s sing!”

It always amazed me that James Bruce had an incredible sense of timing with his choice of songs. I often thought the Holy Spirit was speaking through him because his timing was so uncanny. At the beach, he would get in the ocean, be hit by a wave, and start singing:

O the deep deep love of Jesus vast unmeasured, boundless, free
Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me.

Sometimes at night after we would put him to bed, Bruce and I would hear him over monitors singing himself to sleep with “What a friend we have in Jesus.” He might not have had many earthly friends, but he certainly found a friend in Jesus.

Some days I’d be overwhelmed with caregiving and James Bruce would wander through the house singing “I worship you, I worship you! The reason I live is to worship you.” Often when James Bruce sang there would be a look of pure joy on his face and Bruce and I knew that we were witnessing just a glimpse of God’s glory. James Bruce lived close to God.

It’s been four years since James Bruce’s death. The acute grief that Bruce and I felt in the immediate days following our son’s death has eventually given way to an ever-present dull ache that I suppose we will live with until we too go home to the Lord. Grief and gratitude have run parallel tracks as I’ve thanked God for the gift of James Bruce. Through it all, God has been faithful. I remember, rehearse, and recall the things I know to be true: God is always good and we are always loved.