When we recognize that something which impacts anyone of us can quickly impact all of us, we know everyone must learn the signs of what the disease looks like before it is too late.
While the disability experience is not a monolith, by & large caregivers and disabled people are familiar with the feeling of being excluded from environments that seemingly welcome their presence but not their belonging. And I have to wonder if our churches are not fully FOR the least among them first, then who are they really for?
We have experienced a long night where we have been brought face-to-face with the staggering inequities pervading our society. No longer are we able to say we didn’t know, for we have seen with our eyes, heard with our ears, witnessed in multiple ways, how those on our margins have been left in Egypt to fend for themselves.
It is awfully convenient to believe the right thing to do is whatever you want, at anyone else’s expense. It felt like the lives of the sick and vulnerable didn’t matter. Then George Floyd was murdered.
It’s been a long road, and it’s not over, though it does seem to be changing. And we felt we couldn’t let this moment pass without marking it together in some way.
Especially during a time when it feels like we are all suffering, when no one is really “healthy” and giving out of an abundance of energy, time, or resources, I battle two conflicting motivations.
It’s a mystery our culture often refuses to face, Peterson argues; and while her book was written almost entirely before the Covid pandemic, this contemplation of death—our cultural refusal to face death, the transformative power that accompanies those who do—is prescient, Peterson’s voice prophetically calling us to “awaken to death” as a way to live more profoundly.