Disability of Disconnect

A friend recommended a free e-book entitled “Disability and the Sovereign Goodness of God” by John Piper. It’s about how disability in this world can change us for the better. The question asked is not if disabilities will surface in your church; the question is how will you respond when they do.  

After downloading the e-book, I skimmed through it. This conclusion stood out:

"But Jesus left hundreds unhealed at the pool of Bethesda. And told the one man he did heal, who had not even believed on him—to wake up. I am pursuing your holiness.

The main issue in this age till Jesus comes back is that we meet him—meet him—in our brokenness, and receive the power of his forgiveness to pursue holiness. In this calling to faith and holiness, the disabled often run faster and farther than many of us who have our legs and arms."

This brings to mind a recent event. I visited a boy yesterday who met with an accident and he is only ten. His mother has to stop work to take care of him for the long haul. He is bedridden for life and eats through a tube and drinks through his nostril.

Under the stress and distress of work, but able to amble and ramble, I completely forgotten about the privileges I enjoy for being "dis-disabled". And still distracted by the little gadflies of my life, I walked into the small and cramped HDB 2-room flat.

What greeted me was the boy's unpretentious smile. His mother told me he loves visitors. The boy then mustered the energy to wave at me, still smiling. It was a faint wave but one packed with a heart of gratitude.

There and then, I realized that there is really no difference between that child and I. While he may suffer from the disability of the physical, I think I suffer from the disability of the spiritual.

In my cocooned normalcy, I have lost a part of my humanity, that is, the ability to relish the joy of the moment, the bliss of a smile, charm of a hug, and the delight of a wave. It took a suffering child who thinks nothing of himself to remind me of all that.

That's the power of imperfection in this world and honestly we cannot live without it. Not that we desire it, but we are deeply inspired by it. And like a stream of water, it nourishes our soul.

People of disabilities show us who we really are, that is, our God-bestowed identity, in the community of faith. Hans Reinders once wrote, "To look at other people's brokenness and limitation without seeing our own is a gesture of power; to acknowledge our own brokenness and limitation in the face of theirs is a gesture of community."

Although I don't dare to trivialize the pain that the child goes through, or how his family (he has two other siblings) will have to change their lives around him (the mother once told me that her life was over the day her son met with the accident), I feel deep inside how the disabled can teach us much more than we can learn without them.

I fear that there's a greater disability in this world and it is the disability of disconnect. When we feel little for others, believe in our own invincibility, and expect a world of nothing less than perfection, we suffer from a disconnect that robs us from being truly human.

Let me end with this quote: "In actual fact the distinction between the healthy and the handicapped does not exist. For every human life is limited, vulnerable, and weak. Helpless we are born and helpless we die. So in reality there is no such thing as a handicapped life. It is only the ideal of health set up by the society of the capable which condemns a certain group of people to be called "handicapped.""

So, I can easily understand why the disabled “often run faster and farther than many of us who have our legs and arms.” The distance covered is not about the physical estates we see with our own eyes. It is the distance across hearts. It is the distance beyond prejudice. Most of all, it is that borderless distance that connects us to them. Cheers out.