Heather Bellamy spoke with Claire Hine

Claire: I was saved in the April and then in the May delivered. I was married in the August and fully baptised in the Holy Spirit in the September. It was a very busy year that year. The very next year my son Chris was born and he was a joy and delight. Two and a half years later we had Joshua and from very young we realised that there was something wrong with Joshua. It was diagnosed at eight years old, because he was very smart and he could tell the doctors what was wrong with him because he was so bright. He has Asperger syndrome, which is a very high functioning autism, very like my father. He's absolutely brilliant in things like special awareness and building things, but his communication and his language was very limited and he couldn't speak until he was five. He called an elephant an enbit until he was 10, but he was a lovely boy. Then we had Rachel who was a promise from God; because we had Josh who was very difficult we didn't want to have any other children because we thought it would be too much for us to cope with, but we had Rachel who God asked us to have. I conceived the first day that I could, which is an awesome story, which I can't go into now. Then a few years later we had Isobel, so I have four children.

Josh is the one I'd really like to concentrate on in this interview. God's done amazing things with all of my children. Josh is now 20 and he's amazingly just passed his test. He's got a job and we believe that as much as he can be Josh is cured of his Asperger syndrome. He occasionally has problems with things, but Josh is the one who really got me thinking about life and that we are all created for a purpose and a destiny. I believe with my story that my destiny and my purpose is maybe for the prophetic in Gods Kingdom, but it was hijacked for a while by the enemy. With Josh I thought, well why is my son got this awful thing? He doesn't have a level playing field, was the way I described it. He would have prejudice against him. People would judge us as parents thinking we were bad parents. When we were in Tesco's we would be going down the conveyor belt with the shopping - we laugh about it now - but I used to have to attach him to me in case he ran in the road to try and kill himself, because he had no fear that a car would hit him and he would die. It was very difficult to have him as a little boy. I remember driving to work one day and I was absolutely crying my eyes out to God and I said, 'Lord, why? Why have you given me a child with Asperger syndrome, because it's so difficult for us and so difficult for him?' I'd just watched a film the night before about King George, which was the queen's father. He was not meant to be king because we had Edward and Edward was a sympathiser with Hitler, but because of his affair with Mrs Simpson, George had become king. George had a stammer. It was a handicap that was very painful to him. He had to talk to the nation on radio and in private he would wince at his disability in his own eyes. They say that when he was crowned king the people who were there to see it said that when they put the crown upon his head he visibly grew in stature as he wore the mantel. God said to me, 'As I called that man to his kingship, I've given your son a disability for a reason'. I began to see what the rest of the programme had said; because of his stammer he had such humility in private and when he was in talks with Churchill at the time of war and that bond between them was one of the things that won us the war, because of the way they interacted with each other. He said, 'your son, because of his disability, he has a true destiny too and not to be afraid of the disability'.

Heather: So from that point how did that change things for you and your son?

Claire: We prayed for him. We had a wonderful guy called John Barr that came to pray for him and he said, 'Josh, do you believe that God is going to allow you to pass through every barrier in life that you will face?' and you couldn't get eye contact with Josh when he was very small, but John Barr managed to get eye contact with him. He said, 'Do you believe it; do you believe that you'll pass through every educational barrier, every social barrier, everything you face in life? You may do it later, but you will succeed. Do you believe that?' He said, 'Yes' and he got eye contact with him and from that time Josh has completely changed, but it's done more than that; it's given me compassion for Mums that feel judged or isolated because of their child's behaviour. We now have a coffee morning and we have a Mum's banquet once a year for Mums of autistic children so we can chat. We're all informationed out. We've got every bit of information you can imagine on autism. It's very high profile, but what Mums don't have is other Mums to talk about the laughs and the tears and the day to day running of things. That's what we've been able to do out of my son's life.

Heather: Tell us about the banquet that you held.

Claire: We thought we're going to put on an amazing banquet with a pamper gift as the ladies come in the door and they're dressed in their nice clothes. They don't often get out of the house. They've got baby sitters at home so they're free to be just normal Mums. They came absolutely beautiful. As they came in the door we gave them either a chocolate pamper pack or a bath pamper pack. It was whatever they chose. We bought the best we could get with lovely books to read. Then they went to the banquet and we started it with a toast. Janet Stirling my dear friend stood up and said, 'We're going to toast you Mums on behalf of your children who can't say this to you and we're going to say thank you for all you stand in, in all that you do and we want to bless you.' I've never seen anything like it. There were about 22 Mums that we'd invited and there wasn't a dry eye in the place, because they'd never heard that said to them.

We shared a meal together. We had four women stand up with their different stories. I've got to tell you this one - this is hilarious. This boy called Ben was asked to go and see his Granny and he said, 'How long do we have to sit here and stare at Great Granny?' That's just some of the things they come out with. Then this Mum told this story of what this boy said and we had laughs, but we had the tears as well. We had one Mum who stood up and said, 'No-one knows what I've had to go through' and she told her story. She wasn't one that was asked to speak, but she stood because she wanted to tell us and a lot of support came for her.

We now have a coffee morning and we've got on Facebook for us all to chat.

Heather: You'd better tell us the address of that in case anybody wants to go on.

Claire: Well if you Facebook me, Claire Hine, I'll accept you as friend and you go to Mums of Fascinating Kids through my Facebook page. Tell me who you are and then you can go and access it and talk to other Mums. You're very welcome to join us.