There are days like today when I envy my daughter Jeyli, and the perspective she has being autistic. She’s a happy, thoughtful, intelligent girl who loves her family and friends. Her interests are Pokémon, art, music, recording videos and taking pictures, singing, dancing, and she wants to learn to play the trumpet.

She doesn’t know or care about politics. She doesn’t know how people let such things twist and change them into something they didn’t start out as. She knows what death is, but she doesn’t know about terrorism, domestic or otherwise. She doesn’t know that the country she lives in is divided over such things. She isn’t aware of how cold some people’s hearts have become or the degeneracy some people worship instead of God.

She does know about God, Jesus, and the Bible. She goes to church with us and has watched her parents perform music and worship the Lord. She’s not a Christian yet but that will be her decision to make whenever she’s ready.

She works hard at school, excelling at virtually everything including Physical Education. She’s had good teachers who understand and love working with kids with special needs.

My daughter has been blessed with something most other school kids don’t realize they’ve lost (in part or whole): at fourteen years old, she still has her innocence, and a child’s view of the world.

So, while most people are sharing their feelings, both good and ill, about crime, murder, assassination, and the horror of September 11th on this twenty-fourth anniversary of the attacks, my daughter is blissfully unaware of those things and is going about her morning at school. She doesn’t need to know what we know, and she certainly doesn’t deserve to be burdened by it.

Most people don’t understand autism or have misperceptions about it. It’s complicated and it affects each person on its spectrum differently. But it’s no curse. She has a relatively normal life. And if it’s the Lord’s will, I’d love to see her continue to grow up, find love with the right man, marry, and maybe have a family someday. Time will tell.

But on days like today, I see her autism as a blessing from God. My daughter deserves her innocence, and I will do all I can as her father to protect it. And her.