Disability and a Faith That’s Big Enough for Pain
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john stonestreet
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with
g. shane morris |
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A test of a worldview is whether it is big enough to weather sickness, disability, and the scorn of a culture.
A
week ago Monday, my friend Joni Eareckson Tada had surgery to remove a
cancerous nodule. This less than three years after being declared
cancer-free. I’m thankful to say that the procedure seems to have been a
success.
Please pray for Joni, her husband Ken, her family, and the continuing work of her ministry, Joni and Friends.
Soon
after she received this new diagnosis, Joni wrote me about what it
means to “suffer well.” And I thought: If there’s a category of life
more alien to the secular, progressive mind, I don’t know what it would
be. A dominant message in our culture is that suffering is irredeemable,
worthless, and to be avoided at all costs—even at the cost of life
itself. That’s the thinking behind doctor-assisted suicide for instance,
something Joni has fiercely opposed.
Still
what continually stuns me, and convicts me, is how Joni
understands—even now, even after fifty years in a wheelchair and even in
the midst of a second battle with cancer—that her suffering is not
about her. It has eternal potential.
She
knows (and she’s told me herself) that the way she handles what’s
happening to her right now will send a message: not only that life with
disability is worth living, but that God has a special place in His
family for those our culture considers inconvenient. She understands
that members of Christ’s body who can’t walk, or see, or interact on the
same level as others are not only indispensable parts of the Kingdom of
God, but are needed by the rest of us for our own edification and
sanctification.
Unfortunately,
many of us in the church fail to grasp this. In a recent piece in the
Washington Post, sociologist Andrew Whitehead described how he and his
family have struggled to find a church home. They have two sons on the
autism spectrum, and he tells of degrading comments and behaviors by
congregants who see these boys as interruptions instead of
Image-Bearers.
Whitehead
says he and his wife have spent years watching worship and sermons on
screens, or just giving up and staying home. Christians have told him
his children probably shouldn’t attend church, because they can’t really
“get anything” out of it.
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