Spending a week serving at Joni & Friends left me interacting with a lot of young people and their families who were affected by disability. Some were more extreme than others.
In many ways it was such an awesome week that was filled with joy and God's Spirit. In other ways the week was challenging me to wrestle with truth that was easier to ignore than to agonize over. I can tell you are curious and want me to expound on that. Here are two things I wrestled with the most while I was at camp. Warning, some of this is very raw, don't read it if you want to keep pretending that I really don't struggle as much as I do with my faith at times.
What Is The Meaning of Life, Anyway?
I am glad I required our team to read Joni: An Unforgettable Story, which is Joni's autobiography. Preparing for this camp is the second time I read this book and both times I came away thinking that this is a must-read Christian book. Joni documents her journey of faith through the first years of her quadriplegia. I am so thankful she did this. It is a tremendous testimony of how people change by renewing their minds upon the truth of God's love.
Joni wasn't afraid to admit how low she had sunk in the early days of her disability. She struggled with anger and doubt and suicide. All things good Christians shouldn't deal with, right? Her candor is off the charts and equally as helpful. It was almost shocking to see how committed to suicide Joni was in her earlier days. I started reading the book knowing Joni as a giant of the faith, a guest speaker at Desiring God conferences and a leader/founder of Joni & Friends with global impact. I had never stopped to think that someone so strong could at one point be so weak. Yet God helped her.
Joni would have taken her own life within the first year of her accident if she wasn't completely disabled from doing so. She actually begged her friends who came to visit to help her. Thankfully they didn't agree. Joni's deepest challenge of faith seemed to come in her first step away from the hospital. She went to a place called Green Oaks where recovering paralytics can get the focused attention they need. There she found herself in a cesspool of hurting people who had become very bitter at God, or at least bitter at the possibility that God was good. On the one hand this is understandable. On the other hand it caused Joni to ask the question "what is the meaning of life?" To make a long story short, as Joni renewed her mind in the truth of God's Word she came to see that life wasn't about what she was able or not able to do but in knowing God, who was with her.
I am thankful I had this in my thinking as I approached the camp. The camper I was assigned to requires crutches to walk and he cannot talk (he can sigh, however and he does so constantly:). He was 20 years old and he needs help doing just about everything, including bathroom, putting on pants, and eating food. From the worlds perspective he can't contribute much to the economic bottom line. Yet my assumptions were confronted yet again as I found through reading about Joni Eareckson. Truth be told, when Joni assumed her life had lost all meaning due to her quadriplegia I found myself agreeing with her. And as I looked at my camper who was significantly disabled I had to remind myself that life is in knowing God who is present with us, right?
This hit close to home when I realized my own disabilities. I don't need crutches to walk (not yet anyway) and I am not a quadriplegic but there are skills and abilities that I find myself lusting after, things I realize I will never possess, things I have convinced myself I really need to live a flourishing life. When I play the comparison game I am like a disabled person saying, what is the meaning of life? If I cannot be strong and if I find myself so limited then why do I matter? I realize I have disabilities that I deal with and it all reveals that my life is truly premised on sinking sand. Even though I am indeed saved by the grace of Christ I must confess, my functional assumption that controls me is this: life has meaning when I can achieve great things. Sinfully less so is it in imaging God and knowing his love.
When I Am Weak Then I Am Strong
I found myself meditating on Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10 a lot while I was at Joni & Friends Camp:
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
Once again, this is a passage I could probably quote in my sleep, yet I find myself offended by it. There it is. I admitted it. I am offended by weakness. Sometimes you don't even know what you really think about something until you are really confronted with it. At Joni & Friends I was confronted with weakness all around me. I kept putting myself in the shoes of a parent who must see their child struggle with severe disabilities. I thought a lot about what it would be like to deal with a child of mine who has a disability 24/7/365. I was exhausted and but I knew my time was coming to an end in less than a week. I would go back to my normal life but parents would press on to theirs and it would include an onslaught of weaknesses and limitations.
When I thought of it like this I truly did struggle and found myself despising weaknesses. Oddly enough, even though I realized my weaknesses were so much smaller by comparison I discovered that comparison doesn't work this way either. Namely, comparing negatively to others brings despair and comparing positively still left me resentful that I had to deal with any weakness at all. Perhaps comparison can lessen the sting but it doesn't remove the mountain that is plainly there: I have limitations and I need some way to make sense of it!
If life is about knowing God and revealing his image then, I hear God asking me, is it possible that I can be revealed as much through your weakness as I can through your strength? All I had to do is look at the ways those with disabilities were pointing me to the grace of Christ and I realized that they were in fact contributing a whole lot to our understanding of God! There are things revealed through those with disabilities that would never be revealed through the strong and the competent but only through the dependent. Besides, true competence is an illusion anyway. We are all dependents and sometimes it takes someone with disabilities to help us see that we are really no different.
Oh how my mind needs reformation. I lust after strength and it is all because my thinking tells me that life only has meaning when I can achieve what I dream. Not until I believe that life truly is about knowing God's love and displaying his power can I become content with my weaknesses. In fact, I can be more than content. Like Paul, I will boast in them.
In the never ending grace of Christ,
Pastor Kevin
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