Raising Elvis: Faith, Fear, and the Art of Letting Go

“Elvis! Wake up!” I yelled at my phone. Elvis wasn’t answering. Again.

My son turned eighteen in August. Although it’s technically his senior year of high school, he only needed one class to graduate, so he enrolled at our local college full-time in the fall. Graduation was on the horizon, as long as he passed his stats class.

I was very worried about him passing his stats class.

Before the semester began, I made a vow. “I want you to treat this like your first year of college and not your last year of high school,” I told Elvis. “I won’t ask about your schoolwork. I’m not even allowed to look at your grades. You’re planning to enroll full-time in January. This is college with training wheels. You’re going to need to get yourself up for class.”

His first class began at 1 p.m. It was 12:45 p.m.

Since Elvis didn’t pick up, I pushed my chair back from the desk upstairs in my home office and stomped, loudly, through the kitchen, down the stairs, and into his basement bedroom.

“It’s 12:45 p.m.!” I shouted, flipping on the lightswitch.

“Mom—” he started.

“I’ve told you over and over again that I’m not going to babysit you this fall,” I continued.

“It’s okay,” he said, sitting up in bed and raising a hand, as if to steady a charging bull.

“It’s not okay! You are going to be late to class!” I finished.

“My 1 o’clock class is cancelled.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” I said, “Anyway, you should wake up. It’s after noon. Get dressed. Eat some food.”

“Okay,” he said, grinning innocently.

My son is going to be a brilliant historian or political scientist, provided he can pass his stats class.

In this in-between time, when my son is technically an adult but still living under my roof, I’m finding it difficult to trust that he is going to be okay. We’ve been down some rough roads together over the last eighteen years, into and out of several shadowy valleys.

Elvis started life in this world unable to take a breath. He spent ten days in the NICU.

When we still weren’t sure we’d ever get to bring him home, I was driving back to the hospital, listening to Jars of Clay’s “The Valley Song.” In the quiet of my car, I heard the Lord say, “It’s going to be okay. No matter what. It’s going to be okay.”

“No matter what?” I asked, a deep and mysterious peace cloaking my soul.

“No matter what.”

Elvis survived those fragile first days and left the NICU. They let us just strap him in a car seat and take him home, as if he hadn’t almost died ten days before.

Like Mary, the mother of Jesus, I have treasured and pondered this and many other moments in my heart throughout my children’s childhoods as touchstones of their miraculous existences and the faithfulness of my God (Luke 2:19).

I try to pull out these bright gemstones in moments of fear and anxiety to remember, remember, remember: no matter what, no matter what, it’s going to be okay, no matter what.

Ninety-five percent of the time, Elvis has been a typical child. He is one of the delights of my life. He spent his childhood building Lego sets, constructing sand castles in the sandbox, dressing in superhero costumes, play-acting in our basement, rehearsing for us little-known facts about obscure moments in world history for hours, stretching into adolescent attitudes, and gaming all hours of the day.

But sprinkled in between all that have been bouts of anxiety and depression, an ADHD diagnosis, and suicidal ideation.

When he was very little, it felt like my sole purpose in life was to keep him physically alive. I thought that would end when we entered middle school and high school, and yet there we were, battling a different kind of threat.

The storms of my son’s mental health have subsided in the last two years, praise God, but the trauma and fear of those incidents have not left me. I am still the parent standing next to his sedated body in that NICU incubator, waiting for him to start breathing on his own, still helpless.

I am not always the woman in the car, trusting the voice of her Lord, who promised that, in the grandest scheme of things, all shall be well, even if the worst nightmares come true, it will be okay, no matter what. More often than not, I am Mary at the door of the house, knocking, worried about what might happen next (Mark 3:20-34 NIV).

“Elvis! Wake up!” You’re going to fail stats class! And then what? What will happen next?

Who can blame me? The last thing I want to be is Mary, standing at the foot of the cross with my closest friends, convinced that if I had been there in the garden, I could have saved him. How, in the shadow of her worst fears come true, did she manage it?

There was Mary, next to the manger, treasuring all these things in her heart, treasuring all these ways God had been faithful, treasuring, so that when the “no matter what” came, she might be able to trust through the agony and grief that it would be okay. Somehow, someway, in the grandest scheme of things, the Lord would make all things well. Even when the worst nightmares came true.

It’s been over eighteen years since God rescued my son from that first valley of the shadow of death, and he’s done it again and again since, in big and small ways.

We’re not even in a valley anymore, Elvis and me. We’re actually on a hillside, climbing. There’s a trail ahead that goes further up and away. It’s his to take. I don’t know yet which valleys he will have to walk or where they’ll lead, but no matter what, the Lord has asked me to trust that it will be okay. No matter what.

I can’t quite let it go, but I’m trying. I’m trying to hold on loosely. To love and let fly. To love and watch fall, maybe. To love and trust the God who holds all things together. To love and trust the God who conquers death. As Elvis gallops out the door, I reach into the pocket where I keep my treasures. They clink and rattle against each other, stones of remembrance I hold close, waiting for what will happen next.

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—Written by Sarah M. Wells. Used by permission from the author.