by Corey Hatfield
A friend once asked, “How can you love him when he causes so much pain?” I answered truthfully, “While Grayson has been at the center of so many challenges, I’ve never once viewed him as the source of my pain. I am who I am because of him.”…
Corey Hatfield was born and raised in Colorado. She and her college sweetheart, Arin, have been married for twenty-five years and are the proud parents of five grown children, one of whom is autistic. Through many turbulent, overwhelming years of parenting, Corey encountered beauty to be the great healer of trauma and now feels passionate about sharing her journey with fellow strugglers. Rather than viewing suffering as a curse, she believes it to be a gift, capable of opening humanity to deeper levels of healing and growth. She and her husband now live on eighty peaceful acres in the Wet Mountains of southwestern Colorado. She also has just recently released her book The Light from a Thousand Wounds: A Mother's Memoir of Finding Beauty in Life's Darkest Moments—a read we’d highly recommend! You can learn more about Corey at www.coreyhatfield.com
When Corey Hatfield describes parenting her son Grayson, she jokes that she could use a bumper sticker: “All I really needed to know in life, I learned from autism.” Behind the humor is a story marked by screaming nights, medical misdiagnoses, shattered assumptions—and an unexpected encounter with beauty. In this conversation, Corey, an Orthodox Christian, writer, and mother of five, reflects on raising an autistic son, walking through a traumatic brain injury with another child, and finding a theology of suffering that helped in providing real and lasting healing. Along the way, she invites churches to trade projects for relationships, solutions for presence, and easy answers for genuine compassion. Ultimately, her story offers not a set of tips for “fixing” autism, but a deeper way of seeing God, ourselves, and one another.…
