This week I attended an interfaith women’s conference in
Philadelphia where I was asked to talk about God’s creation. In my talk I related a personal experience
with a disability. I was asked to post
my testimony:
It was the
summer of 1976. The elders laid hands on
me, there were at least ten of them, all praying fervently and asking God to
heal me. It was a hot, humid mid-summer
night and swamp frogs outside were making croaking noises that seemed to mix
with the many prayers in a peculiar chorus.
After a very long prayer they slowly lifted their many hands from my
head and I was still blind in my left eye.
I came into this healing tent during this weekend camp revival with some
friends and we asked to be healed.
We were in
our early twenties. There were six of us, newly graduated from college, full of
life and full of our faith in the power of God.
We were part of the same Bible Study group that met on Friday evenings
at a United Methodist Church. We heard
about this camp meeting in Western Pennsylvania on the Christian radio station
and it seemed like a wonderful event. Christians camping together on a large
farm out in the middle of nowhere! It would be like a sanctified version of
Woodstock, the infamous hippie rock festival of the late sixties. A makeshift stage featured daily worship
services, Christian rock concerts and heart-warming testimonies about the miraculous
works of God. Former drug addicts and
members of motor cycle gangs spoke of their evil lives that had been transformed
by God's amazing grace. There was a pond
on this farm where new believers could be baptized by immersion and there was a
healing tent where the elders prayed for people to be healed of every kind of
infirmity.
Three of us
from this group of six had physical handicaps.
My friend Stu was extremely myopic and wore glasses that looked like the
bottom of a coke bottle. My friend
Arlene had polio as a child and she still wore a back brace. I was born with an under-developed left eye
and since the age of two I wore a prosthetic eye. It was a plastic shell that covered the blind
eye so that I looked reasonably normal.
The three of us decided to go to the healing tent for prayer.
The elders
in the tent told everyone who wanted to be healed to come forward and to surrender
those things that they depended upon for mobility or assistance as a sign of
faith. On the altar were crutches that a
man no longer needed because his legs had been healed. There was also a hearing aid left by a woman
who was now able to hear. My friend Stu
went forward and clunked down his heavy horn-rimmed glasses on the altar and
asked to be healed of his near-sightedness. Arlene put her back brace on the
altar and said she wanted to be free of back pain. But there were audible gasps when I went
forward and plucked out my plastic eye and laid it on the altar. "I would
like to see in my left eye" I said. The elders seemed a bit shaken and they
went into the back room to prepare for this healing service.
When they
came back in they prayed for Stu, Arlene and me individually but they prayed the
longest and the hardest for me. When the
service was ended none of us were physically healed. One of the elders said
that it was because we did not have enough faith. "Faith comes from hearing and hearing
from the Word" he said, quoting the Apostle Paul from Romans 10. He encouraged us to read our Bibles
more. I wondered greatly at that line of
reasoning. Another elder said that God
may yet heal us and that we should leave our things on the altar and that would
be a sign of our faith that we would yet be healed.
"Now
they were going over the line," I thought.
I ventured a glance over at Arlene and Stu but they were shaking their
heads "yes" to the elder who had made the suggestion. I was not
buying into this. Maybe it was vanity, maybe it was a lack of faith, maybe it
was a moment of common sense, but I marched up to that altar, took my little
plastic eye and popped it back in. Every real eye was on me as I walked down
the center aisle and proceeded out of the tent. I drew a deep breath of relief
as I escaped into the dark, dark country night with the smell of grass and hay
and a canopy of a thousand bright stars over my head. The stars looked all the brighter because we
were so far from any city lights.
I wondered
"Why didn't God heal me?" I
stared at the glittery light show for a long time. I got no answer.
The Christian camping festival
ended with a closing worship service on the hill later that night. Everyone was given a small white candle and
we lit them by passing the light to one another. The speaker on the makeshift stage encouraged
us to shine the light of Jesus in the world.
"Surely," I thought, "there must be a reason why I was
born with one eye."
The next
morning the six of us packed up our tent and duffle bags and prepared to drive
home. As we worked no one talked very much.
No one wanted to talk about the topic that was on everyone's mind: the healing service
the night before. To talk about it would mean one of two things: we unhealed
ones did not have enough faith or God was not able or worse, unwilling to heal
us. And then there was the other theological issue about leaving the things on
the altar. Stu left his thick glasses
and Arlene left her back brace as a sign of faith. Was I the faithless one
because I took back my plastic eye? And
there was the practical issue about the 5 hour drive home to Baltimore. Stu, without his glasses was legally
blind. Arlene, without her back brace
could not sit up. Since there were two
cars it fell to me, in my old Dodge Dart, to be the sole driver with Arlene and
Stu in my car. It was a very quiet ride
through the Pennsylvania turnpike and home to Baltimore.
Fast
forward three years and I began to sense a call that God wanted me to become a pastor,
to shine that light of Jesus by shepherding a flock of people and leading the life
and ministry of a local church. But the
call was even more specific than that. God called me to work with deaf people,
people who could not hear and used sign language for communication, people who
the world often marginalized, people, who sadly the church, for the most part, did
not understand. I began to realize that
being half blind was a part of my call into this work. I could identify with being born not quite
right. I met deaf people for the first
time at a conference where there was a Deaf choir signing. It was love at first sight. I knew this was what I was supposed to do
with my life. It took ten years, many
sign language classes, a seminary degree, two ordinations and a lot of hard
knocks but I eventually found myself pastoring a Deaf congregation in
Baltimore.
Everyone knew sign language there and no one wanted to be
healed. They had their healing. Their sign language was their marvelous and
very sufficient access to knowledge and life.
Their community was their place of sweet relief from a world that gave
them little intimacy and acceptance.
Sadly the hearing world's church was often a place where Deaf people
found rejection and misunderstanding.
That was because of this issue of healing.
As surely
as the sun, God heals people from many sicknesses. Just as surely I believe God allows, even
ordains some people to be deaf or blind or whatever for a reason only known to
God. A disability can be a holy gift, as unique as a fingerprint, as much of a
gift as traditional skills that we value such as intellect, imagination, or
athletic ability.
With the
disability comes a sensitivity to one's humanity and a sympathetic heart for those
who walk the same road. Tenacity and resourcefulness
is developed when one has faced obstacles and rejections. People with
disabilities often know the real meaning of our inter-connectedness on this
planet and how to truly trust one another for survival. Being physically and mentally able, being
bright and talented is a blessing. Being disabled has gifts that are just as
blessed, yet the majority of people in the world don’t realize this. People with disabilities are overlooked and
undervalued much of the time. Instead of
seeking the gift in our infirmity we often hurry to doctors and medicines and
healing services and although that can be the right thing to do, it might be
right to accept a disability and use it as an ability in a new and wondrous way.
Healing can
come when people seek accommodations such as sign language for communication or
elevators or ramps for mobility or Braille in place of written text. Where physical barriers are removed by
accessibility then where is the disability?
It is gone. Harder to accommodate
are hearts and attitudes that won't provide the access or fear of the different
ones. When accessible hearts are present
there are always funds for ramps and interpreters and large print books.
Healing can
come when community gathers and supports one another in love and caring. Healing can come when a mother will learn
sign language in order to communicate with her deaf child. Healing can come when a baby born with one
eye grows up and finds a calling in disability ministry.
