Oct 5, 2026 Show with M. Leanne Todd on “God’s Sovereignty over Mental Illness & One Christian Woman Who Has Battled Mental Illness Opposing Those Demanding Leniency for Lindsay Clancy”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this fifth day of October 2026.

First of all, right off the bat, let me thank each and every one of you who prayed so diligently and fervently for last week's Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon. It turned out to be an enormous success.

I was absolutely thrilled with the crowd that attended. I was perhaps even more thrilled and blessed and edified and challenged by the absolutely superb, phenomenal message that was delivered by my keynote speaker last Thursday, who was Dr. David A. Harrell, pastor of Calvary Bible Church of Jolton, Tennessee, a Reformed Baptist congregation out there, and Dr. Harrell is a very prolific writer, and his keynote address last Thursday at the Pastors Luncheon was on the theme of one of his books titled Why America Hates Biblical Christianity.

And the men, as I scanned around the room during his message, seemed absolutely riveted to his message, a lot of amens and the shaking of heads affirmatively to what Dr. Harrell was saying, and the praise reports keep coming in from men who attended, raving about how blessed they were as individuals by the message.

And I am just so thrilled to have had the opportunity to meet Dr. Harrell for the very first time face-to-face. I've had him on the program several times and have seen his face on my computer screen while interviewing him, but never met him in person until last Thursday, and I hope this is just the very beginning of an ongoing, long-lasting, and fruit-bearing friendship between the two of us.

I am confident it will be. It was also a joy to meet one of his elders, who he brought with him from Tennessee to Loisville, Pennsylvania, to attend the conference, Tommy Lawman, who I also plan to eventually, when he is available, interview on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio.

Tommy is very experienced in an area of study that has fascinated me since I was a little boy, and that is paleontology. And it's always good to have a solid Christian, young-earth, creationist, paleontologist on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio because they are a rare breed of men, and so I will keep you updated on when we have Tommy scheduled to be on the program for the first time.

But today, we have a first-time guest, a guest who came recommended to me to interview by my longtime friend Al Yerkes, who is on the team of Todd Friel's ministry, Wretched Radio, Wretched TV, and the lady of which I speak, who's going to be our guest today, is M. Leanne Todd, and she's a small-town Texas wife and mother who writes Christian literature and poetry, and she's written two collections called Act of God and Who Do You Say I Am?

And we are going to be discussing today God's sovereignty over mental illness and how Christ has delivered her from mental illness and restored her soul, and that is an issue that I am sure is near and dear to the hearts and minds and souls of many in our audience.

The subject of mental illness and the longing that many people certainly have to be delivered from it, have victory over it, it is a controversial subject to begin with. It's a mysterious subject. Not all Christians agree how to define it or what to even call it.

Some, I'm sure, disagree with even the label mental illness for one reason or another, but I am very eagerly looking forward to hearing what my guest has to say on the subject, and so it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever.

To Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio, M. Leanne Todd. Thank you, Mr. Arntzen. It's so such a blessing to get to meet you and to be on your program. I really thank God for your ministry that you have here, that we can ask difficult questions and challenging questions and hope to have the Lord let us answer them as much as in His will to do so.

Amen. And by the way, can I ask you what M stands for in your name?

Yes, that is my first name, Mitha, M-E-T-H-A.

And how do you prefer it given to you by your father?

Yes, my natural father, L .V. Lee Whistler, his mother was named Mitha Edith Wigley.

So Whistler married a Wigley?

Yeah, that was the previous generation before my father, yes.

What do you know about Whistler's mother other than it's a painting?

Oh, I actually know something about that. Actually, I did. Yes, I had a distant cousin named Bill Holt in California, and he did a genealogy many years ago in the 1970s. And it's believed that our lineage went back to James Whistler's brother, one of his many brothers, and that the artist James Whistler is now known to, or at least suspected to have had bipolar.

Disorder. Wow. So, yeah, yeah. Wow. How do you prefer I call you during the interview, Mitha or.

Leanne? I can go by Leanne. They've always called me Leanne. Mitha was such a wonderful, saintly woman, and they were afraid if they called me by her name that it would evoke too much sadness in the family that she had passed before I died.

And so they just called me Leanne all my life.

Okay. Well, Leanne, we have a tradition here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio. Whenever we have a first-time guest, we have that guest give a summary of his or her salvation testimony, which would include the kind of religious atmosphere in which you were raised, if any, and the kinds of providential circumstances that our Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you.

So we would love to hear your story.

Leanne Todd’s Childhood and Conversion to Christ

Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. First, I want to begin just discussing my parents and my childhood. Nothing that I'm about to say is intended in any way to dishonor my parents. They had very difficult aspects of their own childhoods that kind of spilled over into mine and my older brothers.

And they did have some problems with substance abuse, and their marriage dissolved in divorce, and I was never raised in church. But they did profess a belief in Jesus. And around the home, there was always scattered you know, Bibles and decorative items on the wall, you know, crosses, crucifixes.

There was one praying hands sculpture on the wall from Sir Alfred Tennyson, I believe it was. More things were wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, and it had praying hands. And I would always look to these artifacts.

And the Lord placed in my life my maternal grandmother, whose name was Ruby Hansen. And she would sit us on our knee and tell us about Jesus, my brother and I. She would read stories from the Bible to us a little bit.

And I really was drawn to that. I just, I really wanted to know more about it. My parents had their own opinions about the Bible, but they didn't really read it with us very much. And so another point of grace in my childhood was my older brother.

He was getting married when I was about 12 or 13, 14 years old. He was dating a young woman named Nancy. And Nancy is a devout Christian. And when I met her, I just felt love. I just felt a grace about her.

And she always made me feel so special. She always had a hug for me. She always wanted to know how my day was, and I just loved her. And Nancy made it her mission in life to take me to church. And so there was a little church in a small town, and that town was even smaller than my hometown of Corsicana, Texas.

It was literally a town that might've had one stoplight. And there was a little church there. They had a young preacher back in the 1970s, and his name was Rick Roberson. I asked him if I could share his name on the program, and he said I could.

He's now a retired pastor, and he does photography in his spare time. And his artwork is actually on the cover of Who Do You Say I Am? But one day in that church, one Sunday in particular, he was leading a very passionate altar call, and he just would not stop.

And he just continued over time. I mean, he was really pressing the point. And up until that time in my own life, I was seeing a lot of, you know, substance abuse and a lot of anger in my family's relationships with my parents' relationship with one another.

And I began to question. I began to doubt. I began to even wonder if there was a God. And if He was, why was He letting all of this happen? And so even though I had all those doubts, and I just felt like I was meant to address that altar call and go down, but I was so proud and prideful, and I would not, I just, I absolutely wouldn't budge.

And eventually the pastor started saying, I feel the person the Lord is calling today is a youth. And I stubbornly stood there, and I remember I thought, really Padre, male or female, I'm not leaving this pew.

You know, I was just so ardent about not, not embarrassing myself, you know, not going to admit anything's wrong in my life, you know. And so he closed this, and I felt my heart hit the floor. I mean, I just felt devastated.

And I remember thinking in those little aside prayer to God, I thought, I'll go down next week, Lord. Next week, I'll go down. And that is when I learned that Yahweh is not in the business of being put off.

I was standing on the porch steps alone, and I was waiting for my brother and sister's car to come around to pick me up. For some reason, I was in that, I don't know if it was raining or what, I don't remember.

But I was standing there, and I heard my name called, and I turned around, and it was that preacher. And he walked right up to me, and I thought, oh no, what is he going to say? What is he going to think?

And I was a little intimidated. But the second I caught his eyes, there was nothing in him but love. But it's the same grace and love that I saw from my sister-in-law, that I saw from my maternal grandmother.

And he said, Leanne, I believe you were the youth the Lord was calling today, and I believe he just wanted me to share this with you. And it was the New Testament. And so I thought, hmm, you know, male or female, I had challenged this guy.

He was on point, you know, and how could he have known that? Because I hadn't led on to him that anything was wrong in my life that I knew of consciously or even indirectly. He felt oppressed to do that.

And so I had to respect him, and I had to at least read what he gave me. So I read the first four Gospels and on into Acts a little bit. And that's when I realized who Jesus was and is and will be, that he is the eternal God.

He's not just, he's not dormant. He's not waiting in the wings. He's here. He's ever-present. He's working in our lives. He was working in my life, because how did this preacher know to reach out to me in such a profound gesture?

You know, he didn't wait for popcorn and movie night forever to wear off on, let some of this Christianity rub off on me. No, he saw a lost child, and he acted. And he could have got in trouble. You know, my parents could have taken issue with him, or anything could have happened.

But he stepped out in faith and did what he was supposed to do, what he was called to do by the Lord. And so I read about how Jesus, just all of, just, I mean, what can you say? He cannot be captured.

He cannot be, he's so, his grace, his love, his truth, all that he did, all that he said, how he stayed when he couldn't pray. He said, no one takes my life from me. I knew he laid it down for me. And so I felt called to follow him.

Now, I wish I could say, I was soon baptized by that same preacher thereafter, but I wish I could say I led a perfect life after that. And I never failed. I never had any flaws and everything was hunky dory.

But sanctification is a long road. And that same preacher that I had post such trust in, that he was attracting a lot of different people from all different walks of life in the gospel that he was sharing with that congregation.

And it's my understanding that that some of the individuals might not have been appreciated or welcomed. Something happened, I don't know, but he was, he, he left that church. And in the Bible, I had read about how religion, or at least not, maybe not all religious people of the time, but how they had crucified Christ.

And then I saw this preacher being ostracized. And I, I just, I kept my faith in Jesus, but I left the church. And I left the church for a few decades. Later on in life, the actions of another church would prove to me how vital church is.

And then I would finish reading the Bible in its entirety. And I would sit under a lot of the preachers I hear today, you know, the John Pipers, the Paul Washers, and John MacArthur's, and I would have a much better understanding of Scripture then.

And I was called to go back to church many years ago in 2006. And I finally ended up in my church now, the Cornerstone in Nederland, Texas. It's a Reformed Baptist congregation. And so that's, that's basically what happened.

In that respect. Well, praise God. Well, being a Reformed Baptist, I'm delighted that that's where the Lord and His sovereign providence has placed you. Now, did you have already come to discover and embrace the doctrines of sovereign grace, a .k .a. Reformed theology, a .k .a. Calvinism, before you landed at the doorstep of the Reformed Baptist church where you're currently a member?

It did happen first. Yes, yes, yes. I began looking into that as soon as, as soon as I gained more—I didn't even learn about Reformed theology until 2006 or later. In terms of the teaching of it, I mean, I knew what the Bible said, and the Bible backs it up.

So I, when I learned about—I totally agree with the total depravity of man. I love the irresistible grace, the perseverance of the saints, and unconditional election. I'm still learning, though. I'm still learning.

And if anybody ever tells you that they're not learning anymore, that they've learned everything to perfection, then I would stay clear of that person or call upon them to repent. Right. Right. Well, our subject, as I've already said, is how the Lord gave you victory over mental illness and God's sovereignty over mental illness.

Bipolar Disorder, Psychosis, and Treatment

When in your life did you come to realize that there was something in your thinking that was not quite normal, that was somehow bringing you to have great concern over your mind, your thought process?

And please even be detailed as you can with what you mean by mental illness, because as I even said in the beginning of the program, people, even Christians, even conservative Christians and even Reformed Christians, may have different definitions of what that is.

Many of our brothers and sisters in Christ don't even like the label mentally ill or mental illness. So please tell us about what you mean by that.

Okay. I'll tell you what the Lord has carried me through and what happened. Shortly after I was saved, excuse me, shortly after I was saved, my parents' marriage ended and I became very, it's hard to remember because what happened was in my freshman year of high school, I had a manic episode, what they consider a manic episode.

But it was more than manic, it was psychotic. I had completely lost touch with reality. My mother was in a new relationship with a gentleman and I wasn't seeing very much of her. And the school had to kind of call it to my parents' attention that something was wrong.

All I remember was I was sitting in my gym class in freshman year of high school, and the PE teacher came up to me. And I just remember the look on her face. She was very concerned. And she said, I think you need to go see the assistant principal.

And so they took me to the assistant principal and I was sitting there. And I don't.

Know if you ever saw the movie, The Breakfast Club? Yes. It's been quite a while, but I did see it several times, at least five, I think. Right, me too. You know, the principal in that.

Portrayed movie, that's basically what I was up against. Okay. And so I'm sitting there and he just thinks every kid is on drugs. Every kid must be on drugs. If something is going wrong with them, they must be on drugs and street drugs, you know.

And so he's interrogating me and he says to me, have you taken any drugs? And reality and I had parted ways. We were no longer on the same page, me and reality. And so everything was symbolic in some way in my mind.

And so I said, yes, I hadn't taken any street drugs. I've never even been exposed to street drugs. I don't even know, wouldn't be able to tell you one from another. And he said, what kind of drugs were they?

And so I said, well, there are these little red, white and blue pills. I'm totally thinking, I don't know what I'm thinking. I don't even really remember. This is what my mother told me, I said later.

And he said to me, who gave you the drugs? And I said, Satan. And that's when they, I guess, realized they had something deeper on their hands than, you know, a baked honor roll student or something, you know.

So they call my mother and thankfully they call some pastors, some youth pastors who came and talked to me. And I just remember being very relieved by their presence. I don't remember their names. They weren't with the church that I was going to or anything.

My brother and sister-in-law, but I just felt at ease with them and talked with them. And then they took me to the local emergency room where they gave me a battery of tests, you know, and one of them was where you had to count backward from a hundred by some odd number, like three or seven or something like that.

And I did it and I did it very quickly, apparently. And they said to my parents, yes, she's not supposed to be able to do that. And so they then looked up insurance matters, like, yes, I ended up in the DePaul Center in Waco, Texas.

All of this is recounted in the book, Act of God, in the foreword of that book, the very detailed thing I'm going through right now with you. Anyway, so in there, there was this, you know, host of psychiatrists and one of them was a gentleman named, well, I'm not going to say his name.

I don't have permission to say his name. I haven't talked to him in decades, but he was a brilliant man from India. And he said from the get-go, I think she has bipolar disorder and is manic depressive and I think we need to try lithium on her.

And the staff was concerned because lithium can be toxic and it has various side effects and things like that. So what they wanted to do was they wanted to try, they said, well, she's also saying that she's hearing voices, which I never heard voices, but I must have agreed to that at some point.

I don't know. I don't know why, but they said that I said that I was hearing voices. And I think I was agreeing to anything that was said to me at that point. I don't know. I wasn't in my right mind. And so they began to treat me with drugs for schizophrenia.

And that is when I became worse. I was like a lab rat. This went on for weeks, months. And I was at some point where I was like a little robot just walking in concentric circles and squares and I couldn't shower myself.

It was.

A very awful experience. And this is the way you were behaving as a result of the medication?

As a result, the extreme weird, you know, robotic arm, robotic movements and that I lost even further touch with reality. That was a result of this medicines for psychiatric disorder for schizophrenia.

I'm sorry. Now, can you just back up a little bit.

And be more and be more detailed in your explanation? You said you describe yourself as psychotic at one point. Yes, I was. And if you could explain in more detail what you mean by that, how you came to that conclusion and why is it?

What were you saying and doing and how were you behaving that led doctors to believe that you had schizophrenia?

Well, because I apparently I had told them that I had heard I had an imaginary friend since I was five years old. I told them that I don't remember any anything like that in my life ever happening, but that's something I said to them.

So I think it was part of the psychotic break that I was just agreeing to things that were said to me at that time. Now, I did have a lot of what they consider religiosity, which is not Christianity. It's different.

It's thinking you are Jesus. It's thinking it's grandiose ideas and things like that that that are psychotic, that are not rooted in reality. And I was having things, weird, weird associations with religion that aren't founded in scripture.

I can't remember or because I wasn't, you know, it's kind of hard when you're when you come out of something like that. You can't really remember what you thought once you've been brought back into your right mind.

It's like.

A foggy dream you're trying to remember, you know. Yeah, there was a very famous actress, Anne Heche, who was having delusions that she was Christ reincarnated. Yes. Before she passed. I actually know, I am very close friends, believe it or not, with a brother who is an elder at a local Presbyterian church here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

He was at one point a Baptist pastor, and he was the pastor of the Heche family. Anne Heche was in his congregation when she was a child, and he later found out after he had received a call elsewhere outside of California.

I know that he was a missionary in France for a while. That may have been where he was called, but he found out later that Anne Heche's father was an unrepentant homosexual, leaving a double life, leading a double life, and traveling to New York to have sexual rendezvous with men and so on.

But unfortunately, that all may have contributed to Anne Heche's departing from biblical Christianity and having such a disturbed life mentally. And there's a lot of controversy on actually how she really died not so long ago, in 2022, I believe it was.

But I'm sorry for interrupting you. I just thought that was, when you mentioned about the delusions of believing one is possibly Jesus Christ himself, it just made me think of her immediately.

Yeah, yeah. And so this original doctor, the one who said that I was manic, learned that I was bipolar, he said, look, this has gone on for some time, and I still say she's manic. I still say she needs lithium.

And so they tried everything else under the sun. So he put me on lithium, you know, and they had no choice but to agree with him because they tried everything else. And this involved daily blood tests, because they had to make sure the medication was at a therapeutic but not toxic level in my bloodstream.

So every morning, I would wake up and before I was let out of that facility, my whole arm, my up around my several inches below and above both elbows, which is black and blue, and I mean, literally black and purple splotches everywhere.

And so they couldn't really get any more blood out of there. By the time I was ready for discharge, but after about two or three days on lithium, I was able to talk again normally a little bit, I was able to shower myself, and maybe a week on that medication.

I had a lot of my old personality back. And lithium is a salt, it's a natural salt on periodic charts, you know. And so I began to come back down from all this craziness that I was indelible by, you know.

And I tend to do believe that mental illness is a physiological chemical imbalance in the brain that can be treated. However, I want to put a caveat on that. It is, and to this day, I had to get off lithium a long time ago because it did become toxic.

So I'm now on a riprazole, which is a generic form of Abilify. And I believe God has allowed his hand in psychiatric medicine to heal people in that respect when it's his will to do so. It's kind of like if you have a broken arm, would you refuse a cast?

If you were dying of thirst, would you refuse a drink of water and just say instead, no, God will heal me without any intervention? You know, we're not Christian scientists, really. Most of us aren't when it comes to healing our body.

And so I don't think there's any shame in seeking symptom relief through medication with psychiatric issues. But here's the caveat. The medication in and of itself is not what or who has restored my soul.

That alone is Jesus Christ. Because you can be sane and you can be humiliated and you can be disgraced and you can be ashamed of the stigma of having to go to a psychiatrist or, you know, or anything like that.

And when you know who you are in Christ and that he has redeemed you and he has saved you, you see yourself from his vantage point of worth. So enough to die for. Not just some forgotten. Oh, let me put it this way.

It's in the Forward Act of God. If you don't mind, I had written, what purpose could come from such a broken life? Christ saved me before my parents divorced the previous year after reading his Gospels.

But I still had very little knowledge of the Bible and could only count on one hand the number of times I've been inside a church as a small child. So how could I in my ignorance and eccentricities be of worth abuse to anyone, much less Yahweh, the supreme being of the universe?

I did not entertain those questions. They were good ones, but simply not strong enough to penetrate the warmth and joy I felt from this sense of divine inclusion. Richness was upon the day of discharge when they were extracting blood from my hand for the final lithium level.

I wrote rich red blood and filled the bile. The sample was complete. I flinched at the exiting needle and smiled with my Lord. Little did I know such lives are his specialty. And he has equipped me in so many ways to just carry on and not just carry on, but to have joy.

I mean, real joy that nobody can take from me. And later on in life, as I shared with you also, I got married at the age of 22 to a wonderful man. We've been married now for 34 years. It'll be 35 years on February 1st.

And his name is Richard. And he has, the Lord just restored so much in me through his love and his, you'd have to see him with our daughter. We have three kids who are now grown. One of whom has a daughter named Donnie, and she has severe autism.

She has brittle diabetes and she has a mild form of epilepsy. Now, in addition to my illness, which for which I'm treated and for which I seek regular psychiatric help, you know, I don't have a choice.

I don't have a luxury of being crazy. I have a child to take care of that means her needs are paramount. And so I have to seek the Lord and seek medication and stay stable because she depends on that.

And so what really moves me is Exodus 4 .11, where God says boldly, who has made men's mouths? Who makes him mute, deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? And in Isaiah 45, I've got it written down here.

Let me find it. 45, five through seven, I am the Lord and there is no other besides me. There is no God. I equip you though you do not know me, that my people may know from the rising of the sun and from the West that there is none besides me.

I am the Lord and there is no other. I form light and create darkness. I make well-being and create calamity. I am the Lord who does these things. Knowing this, I realize that my daughter was created in the womb to be the way she is, that I was created in the womb to be the way I am.

But why? Why would God allow that? Why would a just and loving God allow that? I'll tell you why. I don't have to tell you why. The scripture tells you why. John 9, they asked if it was the fault of the parents that the man had been born blind.

And Christ said, it was neither the fault of the man nor the fault of the parent that so that the works of the Lord may be made manifest in him. And that is a poem that I wrote about my daughter called Letting Go.

Can I share it with you? Oh, yeah. Is that okay? Yes, it is. Okay, let me, let me look at it right here. I dog-eared it. It goes like this. Letting Go. You were so small when handed to me, dark purple and still, you barely breathed.

I hardly did too while waiting to see why you didn't cry or move suddenly. I held you tight, I wouldn't let go. In that first moment, unable to know just what you needed or how to find it. That's first of many moments if I could rewind it.

Will I have you again? Knowing how it's been so hard for you in a world you can't choose. Where crowds upset you and people stare. Where words are like a den of snares that trap and snag you in their maze while you wrestle from a daze.

They leave you hanging on pieces, gleaning as you struggle with gestures for meaning. Something wanted, something found, something lost or some strange sound has sent you wailing high and low. I hold you tight, I won't let go.

How to ease your pain I seldom know, but I hold you tight and I won't let go. I'd brace for impact, weather the storm, just to keep you safe from harm. But have you again? Of course I sure would, for one of your smiles shines like the sun should.

And for all of the blessings that came by surprises, it was through you that Christ opened my eyes and showed me the point of life as we know it. To lean on his grace, letting his power show it. To reach out to others and lift them up high, not shrink from our problems or shake fists at the sky.

And that's not to say it's all been a breeze, for I've spent many nights bent down on my knees, asking him why. Was it something I did? To deserve this lot? What crime have I hid? Have I passed down my sin to you?

I ask him please that it's not true. And in his word, I have found rest. It's so that he'll be made manifest. And that he is every day. When prayer and praise chase fears away. When joy is found on cloudy days.

That is just when I feel him say, there's just one thing that you should know. I am holding tight. I won't let go. As he says in Isaiah 41 to his people, that I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

Any reference to scripture is documented inside it. So people can look it up in the Bible and see, make their own assessment with their own discernment about what is written. But Donnie has been a blessing.

And just a quick story about God's providence.

Caring for Donnie Through Autism and Diabetes

When you say Donnie, you're talking about your daughter.

My daughter, yes. When she came down with diabetes, we were living in Katy, Texas.

I have a friend who's a pastor there. Christ Presbyterian Church of Katy, Texas. David King. He's, I believe, associate pastor. David King.

Okay. It's amazing how it's just people we, you know, so close that we know. But so my father had had a, the year prior, a couple of years prior, my father had had a massive hemorrhagic stroke and was left paralyzed and bedridden.

And he did not, he lived in that condition for about two and a half years before pneumonia took him from us. And after his passing, we had moved to Berry, Texas for a new job opportunity that my husband had.

God delivered us from that situation. That, that whole story is also shared in the back of Act of God with a short tribute to my father and a story that is called The Birdman. You just have to read it.

But anyway, so Donnie was coming down with diabetes. I didn't know what it was. I just know that she was having to run to the breast room all the time and she was drinking excessively and her moods were off the chart.

With autism, children have frequent meltdowns. Their sensory overload in their environment just provokes them into rage. And the poem I just read, Letting Go, is when times when we would literally have to physically restrain her to keep her from hurting herself or someone else until the storm passed.