Slow learners: it took a disabled daughter to teach her parents to let go and admit that God's in charge.

The hardest lesson for me in life, the one that I seem to need to be reminded of over and over again, is that God's ways are not our ways. Nor, as the prophet tells us, are God's thoughts our thoughts.

I feel like the lessons began in earnest 11 years ago, when I found out that I was expecting our second child. It ought to have been a joy-filled moment. My husband, Chris, and I already had a lively, strappingly healthy 1-year-old daughter, Bridget. And we were eager to put behind us the memory of a miscarriage two months earlier. But as I watched the plus sign appear on the home pregnancy test, I felt strangely apprehensive. All I could think was how much it resembled a cross: sign of redemption, sign of pain. An intuition that I have never been able to explain washed over me, and I turned to my husband and said: "What would we do if we ever had a child with Down's syndrome?"

My husband was stunned. "Why would you say something like that?" he asked. "I don't know," I responded, shrugging. "I just have this feeling."

Eight months later the child who would change all our lives was placed into my arms, with her spun-gold hair and her extra 21st chromosome, the genetic marker for Down's syndrome. The condition, which occurs once in every 800 to 1,000 births, results in a characteristic physical appearance, varying degrees of cognitive impairment, and a range of associated medical problems.

We named our new baby Christina Marie, partly because we wanted to give her versions of both our names as a sign of solidarity, and partly because "Christ" and "Mary" were the two most powerful names we knew. We figured this kid was going to need all the help she could get.

In hindsight, I think that moment of clarity with the pregnancy test was God's way of preparing me for a path that I would never have had the courage to choose for myself. Before Christina, I thought of myself as being more or less in charge of my life, in spite of token nods to my dependence on God. I approached the world pretty much through my head, and had confidence in my ability to protect the people I loved.

All of that has been called into doubt by the experience of having a child with a serious disability. The hard shell of my supposed self-sufficiency has been cracked, perhaps so that something more open and vulnerable could be exposed underneath, could be opened to the light and the air. That's how I look at it these days anyhow.

Christina is 10 now, a little blond bombshell with an infectious belly laugh and an unshakable conviction that a hug can make anything better. Her second-grade teacher says that he values having her in his class, her very serious learning difficulties notwithstanding, because she sets a tone of warmth and caring, and evokes from the other children capacities for helping that they otherwise might not have realized that they possessed. As a classmate wrote to her on her last birthday, misspellings and all: "I apreshate you because your never mean."

Christina has taught us a great deal as well. My husband and I sometimes joke that God gave us Christina because we ourselves were slow learners as parents and needed to have everything writ large. Certainly she has helped to make a few things very dear.

Before we had her in our lives, for example, I didn't understand that intelligence is not the be-all and the end-all of the universe. Like many people I valued intellectual capability very highly, perhaps because of its link to independence, that sacrosanct value of our contemporary Western society. The more I have seen the limitations of intellect alone and how easily it can be misused, however, the more I have come to appreciate our little girl whose wish for the world, expressed on a recent Martin Luther King Jr. Day, was that "everyone should have Popsicles."

In a society increasingly obsessed with eliminating physical and mental weaknesses, frequently at the cost of the very life of the person so affected, while overlooking moral and spiritual deficiencies that are arguably much more serious, we would do well to heed the example of people like Christina. They remind us that we are all a mixed bag of strengths and weaknesses, and that kindness and empathy and cooperation are the qualities that are most needed in our world.

Another thing we have learned from Christina is that when it comes to the really important things in life, like protecting those we love from pain and suffering, we all have a great deal less control than we might wish. In our society today, people regularly abort fetuses deemed to be "imperfect," perhaps in part out of a desire to spare those children future hurt. But the reality is that God holds the big cards, not us, and an "all dear" on prenatal testing doesn't ensure that the baby in question will be spared grave illness or accidents later on, much less that he or she will have a happy and productive life.

I do know how difficult it is to relinquish those illusions of control though. When I was pregnant with Christina, and a prenatal blood screening revealed that she had a higher than average chance of having Down's syndrome, I was anything but sanguine about the prospect. In fact, if the angel Gabriel had appeared to me at that point, announcing our own change of life, I think I would have decked him. I remember standing in our local bookstore, crying my eyes out as I leafed through books about the condition.

One of the main reasons that we declined to have a follow-up amniocentesis to confirm the diagnosis was because I knew I would grieve and rage for the rest of the pregnancy. And we had already decided that we would bring her into the world, Down's syndrome or not. I preferred to take refuge in denial, and leave for another time the learning of what it really meant to say, "Thy will be done."

These days someone will occasionally ask me whether we weren't afraid to bring a child with Down's syndrome into the world, and I say yes: Yes, I was afraid, and sometimes I still am afraid. Christina has a beautiful spirit, lodged in a brain and a body that don't work very well and that render her worryingly vulnerable. She learns with great difficulty, requiring many, many repetitions to master even simple skills. She has a crummy memory. She has a hard time making her speech understood by others. She sees poorly and has no depth perception. She suffers from hypothyroidism and sleep apnea, which require frequent blood draws and invasive tests that terrify her and that she doesn't understand.

After a recent overnight sleep test, during which Christina repeatedly tried to yank off or pull out the many probes and electrodes and monitors that had been stuck on and in her, she and I were both in tears. "I can't do this anymore," I said to the technician. "It's just too much to ask, that I help hold her down so something painful can be done to her."

Christina also comforts herself with teeth grinding and hand flapping and other activities that are distracting and disturbing to others. She loves her classmates, and they are kind to her, but with each passing year it becomes more clear that they do not really regard her as a peer, much less as a true friend. Christina, who is very astute emotionally, senses those distinctions and weeps.

So why must the innocent suffer? This is the question that haunts me, that keeps me complaining to God that if I were in charge I would do things a lot differently. It's the same question I confront every Lent, when I mull over the torture and the death of Jesus. Couldn't you have arranged for a kind of Redemption Lite? Couldn't you have allowed Jesus just to die in his sleep, or at worst to have had a heart attack? Couldn't you have fixed it so that people like Christina could open our hearts and change our lives, as they so clearly do, without having to pay such a terrible price themselves?

But I'm not in charge, and always the answer comes back the same: My ways are not your ways. I cannot trade places with my child and take her suffering from her, much as I would like to. Neither can I guarantee her safety, much less her happiness. All I can do is to be grateful for the chains she has loosed, for the stone she has rolled away.

The other day in prayer, I was fretting about Christina, when into my mind popped a simple phrase: Let her go. Entrust her to the care of the God who made her and who loves her even more than you do. Entrust her to the hands of the other people whom God has put and will continue to put into her path to welcome her. Let her go to another mother who stood at the foot of a cross, her child broken before her and all apparently lost.

And let them lead us toward Easter.

By MARY CLEARY KIELY, a writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts.