Is the God Life for whoever can get there?

Chelsea Jay is a 24-year old model in the United Kingdom. She is the Director of Disability for Models of Diversity, a campaign to include a wide variety of bodies in the media people see every day. Jay had been in conversation with The Clothes Show, a live fashion and beauty event, for a year, pressing the issue of lack of diversity in the event. The Clothes Show invited Jay to speak at a panel, so she took a four-hour journey on three trains to get to the show. When she got there Jay discovered that the show had started ten minutes early and the stage was inaccessible to her in her wheelchair.

It would be one thing if I could say that this kind of ableism and exclusion was rare, or even occasional. It’s not. People who work the hardest on concerns of disability justice are often excluded from recognition. One person I know was told that the stage wouldn’t be accessible to them in their wheelchair. The organizer offered that they could come down to the floor to give my friend their award. They chose, instead, to skip the ceremony entirely. (Pro tip: if you are in this situation, move the entire ceremony to a place where everyone can participate. This is how you do better.)

This struggle reminds me of a story in the Christian Scripture of the pool at Bethesda. It had five porches where people with a wide range of disabilities would sit and wait. They were waiting for a specific thing to happen: once in a while, a spirit would come and stir up the water. Whoever stepped in first could be healed. That day, Jesus stopped and talked to a paralyzed man.

“Do you want to be healed?” Jesus asked.

The man didn’t say yes or no. Instead, he explained that whenever the water was stirred up, he could never make it in first. He had no one to take him to the pool. As a consequence, he had been waiting for thirty-eight years. And, boy howdy, was he ready to tell Jesus that story.

He was saying, “Jesus, I’ve been waiting. I can’t get to where I need to go by myself.”

And it’s still true. People with disabilities experience all kinds of challenges, structural, social, financial, and it is fair to say that while they work on the challenges they face, they are waiting for justice and equity.

Some of the problems that we face, whether disabled or not, are meant to be faced in community. You, the person reading this right now, can find the person you are meant to bring with you to the source of healing and wholeness. All of us need all of us to make it. This is just one more way you live into that future. Does it mean you need to build a ramp? Does it mean you make sure that speakers in your sanctuary can be clearly heard? You can do these things and many others. None of us can get there by ourselves.