Sitting in my car outside the pharmacy, I wept as I clutched a small bottle filled with Ritalin, a prescription drug for hyperactive children. When our daughter was fourteen months old, we had been referred to a pediatric neurologist, who told us she was "developmentally delayed." Now, she was four, and a pediatrician and a child psychiatrist had diagnosed her as having "hyperactive tendencies and probable attention deficit disorder."
The doctor who had just written this prescription had told my husband and me that she would probably need to continue using this medication throughout adolescence. The idea of giving my daughter these pills for the rest of her childhood was what had made me cry.
As I held that pill bottle in my hand, I remembered something I had learned in the Sunday School I attended as a child. We had been taught that we were all God's perfect children. I had loved that idea. And now, that specific phrase, "God's perfect child," came to mind over and over again as I thought about this problem my daughter was facing. I reasoned that if we were truly perfect as God's children, we could never become imperfect. The perfection God causes must be sustained by Him, incorruptible and eternal. What God causes to be perfect couldn't fall from a state of perfection, even for a split second.
