Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground”…God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
Genesis 1:26-27 & 31
This scripture demonstrates profound creation concepts that lie at the heart of our faith. That we are all made in the image of an unseen God. Tricky. But we do have Jesus whose image we can base our thinking. And this fundamental truth, equally valid whatever race or sex you are, disabled or not, is the soil in which the dignity of humanity is rooted – that of a relationship with our Creator God. A God who was pleased with everything He had created, and would create from here on in. But do we feel that? For the longest time I didn’t.
I was born with a physical disability which meant I would never look or live the same as someone without a disability. The special educational needs (SEN) school I grew up in was a strict Methodist establishment with all the religious and charitable ceremony that entailed. So it would be fair to say I grew up with a pretty skewed idea of what being made in the image of God actually meant and my place in the world He had created. Over time as I moved out of the sheltered confines of the care system and met the world, often at right-angles it has to be said, where I learned to find peace in how I was created and confidence living in the world God had created. It was never going to be straight forward because being born, or acquiring a disability, comes with a huge range of ideologies and metaphors all of which often have the net effect of shutting us out of having authentic relationship with God and His people. Jesus interacted positively and with affirmation with a many different kinds of disabled people (Matthew 8:2-4, Mark 10:46-52, Luke 5:17-26). What does it reveal about his mission on earth and the potential he saw in all those he met?
REFLECT
PRAY
& STEP OUT
Disability Models are a way of helping us think about how disability is seen and how we respond to it. Take a minute to consider these Medical vs Social Models.
That we can be authentic missional communities – reaching out to the ordinary spaces to seek those that are missing from his Kingdom on earth.
Are there people you know of who are disabled or have become disabled? What’s comes to mind when you think of them? And then think about them again.