I am having a bad day at the group home, the sort of day where I find myself drafting resignation letters in my head. There is too much to do, and not enough time. There is too much paperwork, and not enough relationship with the people the paperwork is meant to serve. There are too [...]
People with developmental disabilities, people like Sam, have taught me that each person matters. These days, we often forget about the one, about individual people – we are so distracted by all the things and the many people which call for our attention.
This is not the love of romance stories or Hollywood endings. This is the kind of love that brings you to the end of yourself and then beyond. The kind of love that takes all you’ve got during the day and keeps you up at night. Real. Costly. Love.
It is a long and slow process for me, a well-educated and nondisabled white male, to appreciate and to pay attention to the ways that God is working on the margins. But whether it is in pausing my frantic productivity to gaze for a moment at crisp pin-points of light in the night sky or in turning my attention to a neighbour who does not use words to communicate, I am “Learning how to say ‘Hallelujah’ from the ones who say it right.”
I want everyone to have the experience that I had that day – to be in a space where there is true love and acceptance for each member. Where people show up with their whole, unedited selves and are embraced.
These two stories may seem quite different – in the first I was overlooked and in the second I was singled out – but the experience of both was similar. Sitting on my walker meant that I was perceived differently than the people around me.
The technicians had very kindly broken the rules and allowed me to stay with him in the room, but I was still outside of the tube. I had the freedom of my limbs. The noises the machine made were not inches from my ears. I called encouraging words to him inside the tube, but they were just more sounds. So I did the only thing I could think to do. ...
I laid in my stretcher outside the operating room listening to the metallic clink of the doctors preparing their tools and I gave my fears, hopes, and doubts over to God. I had connected with family and friends. Made sure people knew I loved them. The odds were good I would see everyone again but my health had been declining steadily for two years and I didn’t trust my body anymore.
So much of what we do on a daily basis we do without qualifications. We walk through every conceivable season of a person’s life with them because we are the ones who happen to be present when the call comes.
He was middle aged, had Down Syndrome, and spoke no English, but he said hello and quickly answered my introductory question about how long he had worked in that shop. I apologized for not understanding his answer and he realized that I was at a disadvantage in this conversation.
