David:        Karen and I have nine wonderful grandchildren. One presently a third-year college student is autistic.

Karen:        Now, Elias is not only incredibly smart, he’s taught us a lot about autism so much. Let’s begin this visit by sharing a quick example.

Intro:         Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

Karen:        What Elias has taught us among many things, one of the biggest lessons, is when you know one person who’s autistic, you know one person who’s autistic.

David:        Maybe you better explain that.

Karen:        Well, the autistic spectrum, according to Elias, then I’ve done a lot of research myself on it, is very, very broad and very, very large. And so, I think our human tendency is sort of to categorize people into types and he was basically saying that he didn’t want that to happen to him, nor did he want us to do that to him.

David:        So, if you know one autistic person, you basically know that person, but you don’t know the vast scale of autism. Here’s a story about Elias that we still kind of laugh about. It was a hot summer day. He was probably, I’m guessing Karen, about five and the two of us had taken him to the local Dairy Queen.

Karen:        Which is the soft ice cream place in our area.

David:        And it was a hot day. Elias had a big cone and you kind of felt he wasn’t eating it fast enough because it was dripping down on his hands. So, you would take the cone and with your tongue kind of resolve the problem, clean it up and give it back to him. That happened a couple of times and then finally Elias said, very diplomatic as a five-year-old. “Just my idea, Nina,” he called you Nina, “you eat your ice cream and I’ll eat my ice cream.” He wasn’t happy with what you were doing.

Karen:        So around that same time period, I’ll say 15 years ago, so we were looking for someone to work part time at our office as an editor for articles, books, whatever we were working on.

David:        And a young man named George Koch applied. He had a college degree. In fact, he had graduated with high honors and George was autistic.

Karen:        And it was hard knowing at that time whether or not this would be a good idea to hire him. George was very quiet.

David:        I remember that day in fact and seemed timid. He’s not at all timid in my mind now, but it just was one of those things where you’re trying to process everything, and your mind has a lot of questions.

Karen:        Anyway, to make a long story short, George recently told us that this week marks the 15th anniversary of him coming to work with us. You started with us as an editor, George, but as various people left, you have assumed numerous other responsibilities such as what?

George:     Well, I think it’s fair to say that they’re so numerous and so varied that it’s hard to rattle them off one by one. I tend to perceive my role as being simply here to be a helper to the two of you in whatever capacities I can be, whether or not it’s an area that I’ve been specially trained in.

Karen:        These past 15 years you have grown spiritually, I think, as a result of being part of this ministry. If I’m right about that, how do you think you have grown spiritually?

George:     Well, let me say this to both of you. I think one of the biggest ways God has acted in my life over these years is by allowing me to be part of and to be able to witness both of your ministries and your passions. And I would say, because I have been blessed with the opportunity, an ongoing one, to see two people who really have God’s heart for others and who actually are obedient to the convictions they feel and follow God’s promptings about how to actually put those ministries that are needed into real life action. I think God has given me both two great people who have been examples by their own lives of what ministry looks like when done right. And for that matter, God has certainly given me an increasingly more convicted and clear heart about where his own callings for me lie. And I’m grateful that these years have been sort of a catalyst to help shed a lot of light on things of God that I wanted to be clear but that I didn’t even know how to approach him at first.

Karen:        I have a profound question. “Who’s the most fun to work with? David or Karen?”

David:        Long pause.

George:     David knows which answer he’s thinking I’d better say. I’m going to play a diplomat card and actually say…I’ll say it this way. Our combination on the three of us, we hell have a great deal of fun. A lot of laughs and I don’t think that it’s a matter of who’s more fun or who’s funnier, I think maybe one thing that I could say, if forced to choose, I would say that, in terms of who am I more like in humor and in general personality, if pressed to choose one or the other, at least as far as who am I more like, I would say Karen and I have more aligned personalities in some ways. And in that way perhaps we find humor more readily. But David is very much equal as a co-worker and as a fun friend to have a working relationship with.

David:        I think you did that very well. I didn’t know how you were going to protect your backside on that one. But I’m going to ask you to do something that is hard.

I have thanked you repeatedly, George, for different projects you have taken on and one I come back to again and again. We supposedly took out a loan of $25,000 for me and $25,000 for Karen when the government made that possible several years ago. But we knew nothing about it. It was a fraudulent thing.

So, we had $50,000 that were put on our names that we owed the government between the two of us and we knew absolutely nothing about it. And I was going crazy trying to get that thing resolved and I finally decided I was going to turn it over to you and see what you could do. And by golly, over time, you solved it. I don’t know how in the world you did. But why would you even have said, “I’ll see what I can do for you?” It was amazing to me.

George:     Like I said, I’m here to be a helper in whatever capacity I can, even if it sometimes seems above my pay grade.

David:        Knowing your pay grade, I think it was. It was above what you’re being paid for.

George:     Well, we’re not talking about how pay rate. A simple way to answer would be whether it’s someone you work for or someone who’s a friend or both. You do the best you can to help the people you love, especially when they need it most. And I wasn’t sure whether it was something that I could actually pull off for you guys. But I knew that I could certainly give it my best effort and try to break through some of the red tape; some of the many forms online, some of the phone calls. Find where the paper trail began, and then begins to find a way to submit evidence that you guys actually were not involved in what was purported to have happened.

David:        One of the things I’ve become accustomed to, and people may not sense this as they’re listening, is that you talk very deliberately and very slowly. And if I interrupt, I’ve done you a disservice because you tend to have to replay then and go back over what you’ve been saying. So, I’m listening very closely, and this is very typical of conversations that we have. We started by talking about our grandson who says that if you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person. So, people listening to us, they’re not going to say every autistic person is going to be like the one who worked for David and Karen, George Koch. That’s not true. You are your own person and who you are as a person has become more and more thrilling and more and more delightful, at the same place to both of us. When you say that Karen, Karen’s nodding her head. Karen, just to ask you a question. What’s been good about George and what’s not really good about George?

Karen:        Well, George, you understand we would ask this about ourselves as well. What’s so good about working with us and what’s not so good about working with us? Well, I think over the period of 15 years, we’ve come to understand George’s capacity more. Sometimes people who have autism or have a speech disability, I think when people present with that, we sometimes categorize them. We don’t understand them, and we categorize them to be less than maybe.

Well, George is extraordinarily intelligent. You gave the example of going through the small business administration that we were supposed to owe $50,000 to. It just was working back through all kinds of things. What we discovered is that when COVID hit, there were hundreds of thousands of dollars of monies released by the government. You know, we were never called on the phone. We were never contacted by letter.

David:        You need to pay this off.

Karen:        Have you taken this loan out? So, money was just doled out all over and the fraud was over the top. So, by the time George had worked his way through all of that stuff, the government was soon after that, beginning to say, we’re not even going to contest people who come to us and say, “We didn’t take this money out. The fraud landed in so many places.” But he’s the one who stuck with it.

So that’s his capacity. Whereas I was ready to give up on it. I was tired of the whole thing. But that was part of George’s giftedness is the capacity to stick with something and see it done when it’s complicated.

So, George, before we end here, I’m wondering if you have some additional thoughts about autism that you’d like to bring up

George:     As much autism awareness as there’s been there’s still an awful lot of people who, as soon as they meet someone who seems autistic, they jumped to all sorts of presuppositions and misconceptions. I remember in rehearsing this; you asked me if there was something that was common to all autistic people. And without missing a beat, I said, “Well, smarter, funnier.”

And I would say autism is a prime example. Among countless other conditions, syndromes, differences that is so broad in how it presents that you never quite know what’s in the person’s heart, what’s in their mind when you first meet them. And for that matter, if you don’t give them a chance, one of the things that a lot of people, for me particularly, and that’s common to autistic people is the way that they talk. They can sound or seem socially detached or disinterested or emotionally uninterested or reserved or not able to particularly empathize or like they’re not having many feelings period in their heart and mind. And frankly, nothing could be further from the truth about autistic people and for that matter other people, autistic or not.

The common thread is we want to be understood and for that matter we want to show other people that we both can receive love and give it and in turn be a good reflector of Christ just as well as any other person, even if the way that the words come out is other than what you expect. I’m different, autistic people are different. I say, “So what?”

Karen:        That reminds me that in conversations with our grandson, Elias, we’ve said, “Would you ever want not to be autistic if someone came up with a cure.” You know, one of those miracle cures, and you could take it. Would you take it? And he said, “Oh no way, I like who I am.”

George:     In fact, it’s a question as well as flawed because that assumes that autism is something that needs to be cured. It’s not a defect, it’s just a different way of thinking, seeing the world and processing it and relating to others. But we all, we autistics want to love and be loved and show God just as much as everyone else does. What can I say?

Karen:        When we hear someone, they have a halting presentation, what we do not want to do is categorize them and because we don’t understand. And working with George for 15 years has taught us when you know an autistic person, you know an autistic person, Elias, his age and understanding of autism, our grandson has taught us that and George has been the daily living manifestation of that as we’ve worked with him.

David:        I was trying to, in my mind, come up with a sentence. Why would we interview George? And the sentence is:  Be convinced that God’s blessings often come in surprising ways. There’s no way 15 years ago I would have known the incredible blessings that God had in store for us in terms of this relationship. With this person we were thinking in terms of hiring and his ability to expand in so many different ways. Aren’t you glad, Karen, that we didn’t make a decision saying that doesn’t look like that’s going to be the best of arrangements?

Karen:        Yeah, and what we’re saying to our listening audience is that everyone has someone in their life that they don’t understand. Maybe a work person, maybe a neighbor, casual acquaintance. And the journey of sticking with them to reach a point of understanding is often an extraordinarily revealing one about your own incapacities, your own rush to judgment, your own hesitations to learn from people who have so much to give and yet you don’t understand them, so you cut them off.

David:        Your own way of doing things.

Karen:        Yeah. You want to do it your way instead of knowing that there are people who have gifts to bring to you that will do it better than your way. Or amplifier, compliment your way.

David:        Literally better than your way. I’m willing to say that.

Karen:        You wouldn’t have stuck with that small business long, would you?

David:        I don’t know what I would have done. That’s why I keep thanking you. Okay, let’s see if you could take a poke at a better key biblical truth than I did, or you’re going to stick with what I put down.

Karen:        Oh, I think you’ve got it. Be convinced that God’s blessings often come in surprising ways, or I might add to that, in surprising ways and through surprising people.

Outro:       You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters, hosts@beforewego.show.

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