Called to respond, to love and to see beauty
Do you have a spiritual perspective on why children have disabilities? Does God choose particular children/parents?
No disability is good. Some are a result of our choosing to live without God. Genetic disabilities are different. John 9 tells about a man who was born blind. Jesus said his blindness was not the result wrong behavior (neither the parents nor the man himself.) Instead Jesus continues, “It happened.” I think genetic disabilities and natural disasters are similar. They happen. We live in a good but not a completed world. Good but not completely perfect children are born into our world.
I’m more certain of what God does for children with disabilities and their parents than I am why they happen. Jesus had compassion for, hung around and healed children (and adults) with disabilities, even some who were ungrateful.
I don’t believe God chooses particular children/ parents to endure horrible disabilities. I believe God does choose to work grace in all of us. As my favorite rock star theologian Bono says, “Grace travels outside of karma, Grace finds beauty in everything, Grace finds goodness in every thing, grace makes beauty out of ugly things. As a Wesleyan the final’ ugly to beauty grace’ will happen when we leave these bodies and are glorified.
We live in the world that already experiences God’s grace and has not yet received all that God has for us. Donald Miller likens this to receiving an invitation to the Wedding Feast but not yet sitting down at the table. So we are called to respond, to love those with disabilities, to try to see the beauty in everyone and to prepare for what is to come.
Steve Thomas is Pastor of Families at Harmony Grove United Methodist Church in Lilburn, GA Together with his wife Cheryl he has two children Geren and Glori. Geren is a Senior at Parkview High School and Glori is a Freshman. Steve has a Master’s of Divinity from Candler School of Theology, Emory University. Steve is blessed by grace each day but counts by far the most explicit experience of God’s grace as the day when his wife Cheryl was a living kidney donor for a young girl with ARPKD.
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About The Author
Julia Roberts
Julia Roberts is founder of Support for Special Needs and has been a regular contributor since its inception in May 2010. A mom to two kids with special needs, she didn't want other parents to feel what is the often isolating world of raising a child (or two!) with disabilities. Her kids had kidney transplants at the age of eight and will need liver transplants in the future as a result of ARPKD/CHF. They both have vision disorders and learning disabilities.
What would be an example of a disability caused by a decision to live without God?
Fetal alcohol syndrome or cancer with synthetic environmental causes are examples. Sometimes it is individual choice, sometimes social decisions.
Love, love, LOVE this posting, Steve! This has to be THE perennial question parents of kids with special needs struggle with. However, I think there’s great freedom when parents get to a place where they can let go of the “why”, affirm in their hearts that God is still good and loving, and move forward using their trials to bless. (Romans 8:28)
Reverend Steve, I’m deeply grateful for your wife’s kidney donation. What a wonderful gift. Thank you for supporting your wife in making this generous donation, which was risky for her and thus for you and all of your family. From all of us who deal with PKD, thank you so much. It’s a gift that cannot be repaid, which makes it the best gift possible.
I hope you won’t mind if I go on from those sincere thanks to respectfully debate your theology, including your assertions about the disabilities of those who choose to live ‘without God.’ I respond to those statements not with malice, but with genuine concern, for I have seen many misled, and was misled myself for many years as a young boy.
As you know, Jesus didn’t stop after saying, “It happened.” Depending on one’s translation, the whole sentence reads, “It happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” And then Jesus healed the man, according to the writer of ‘John,’ who penned those words at least 60 years after Jesus died — meaning that the writer almost certainly didn’t witness the event, but heard about it.
Whether Jesus really said those things and healed the man or not, what’s hard for Christians living today, as you know well, is that even though Jesus promised his disciples that they, too, would be able to heal people, that particular power seems to have left the Earth when Jesus did. When a child today is missing eyes or a limb, even the proudest faith healers don’t pretend they can actually fix the problem. Instead of a new limb, they offer platitudes.
Isn’t it simpler to acknowledge biology? For in addition to all being sinners, all of us are also the products of a series of biological mistakes — genetic mutations that began long before the first primates. Without those mistakes, of course, the first single cells would have reproduced perfectly, and would have remained solitary cells; nothing more complex would ever have evolved. So thank God, if you like, for mistakes!
Most mutations are harmful, but a few good ones led to our bigger brains, and our capacity for love. I carry a harmful one, myself: the gene for the dominant form of polycystic kidney disease, ADPKD, which I inherited from my late dad. I have many feelings about carrying this gene, which I may have passed on to my infant daughter. But this is just one of thousands of genes I have. Most of them work well, or I wouldn’t be here to type this. Most of yours work very well, too, of course, or you wouldn’t be here to read it.
So much of life is chance. Each of us is incredibly lucky that the sperm containing half of our genes managed to reach the egg containing the other half. That egg was one of many hundreds, and that sperm was one of hundreds of millions to swim out just that one time. (Most of us should thank our moms for having been in the mood!) The odds were just as low for each of our parents being conceived, and surviving long enough and being attractive enough to reproduce, and so on back to the plains of Africa.
How marvelous to be alive, and see each other, and hear great music and good jokes, and love each other, and experience the mysteries of this vast and ancient universe for as long as we’re here. What a treasure! Children with special needs have had things go wrong, just as we all will have things go wrong on our way to the grave. Still, they’re alive, and most are loving, and they very much need our love. Why should it matter to their needs or ours whether or not there may be a God somewhere? And why pretend that people who live “without God” are somehow worse off — more prone to fetal alcohol syndrome or other things (May I introduce you to some deeply religious alcoholics I know?) — when it’s clear that most of the people who live “without God” are quite happy, and intelligent, and loving? Rigorous surveys show that the happiest people in the world live in Denmark. Precious few Danes believe in God anymore. Yet they care for their children, including those with special needs, much better than we Americans care for ours. Should we not learn from them?
Should we not focus a little more on caring for our nation’s children, and a little less on worrying about what the God of our various stories might be up to? If God’s really there, after all, He can tell us later. If He’s not, then we’ve already wasted a lot of time. And we have very little of that.