First Church of God Merced CA Sept 7, 2013
Three Views of Disability

Rick Eastin


My name is Rick Eastin. I would like to share with you a little bit of my pilgrimage as it relates to my disability and to Christianity. From the ages of 3 to 14 I attended a school for persons with mental and physical disabilities. It was during my last year at that school that God met me in a most profound way.

Before I give an account of this event, I need to give you some information about my own disability.

I was born with Cerebral Palsy. This affects me both physically and emotionally. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I understood the second aspect of my disability. At that time, I perceived myself to be only physically disabled. Because of this misunderstanding, I had a dislike for my fellow students who were mentally retarded. I did not want to be around “those people.” I considered myself to be better than them, and therefore, I did not want to be associated with them. From my perspective, this dislike is similar to racial prejudices.

My prejudice against developmentally disabled people began to change during a school recess when I was 14 years old. I met a young lady who was both mentally and physically disabled. She had a radio. I asked her where she got her radio. She said that she had received it for her birthday. I then asked her how old she was, thinking to myself she could be no more then 13 or 14 years old. She told me, “I am 18 years old.” I was shocked at her answer! That one event started a love in me for people with developmental disabilities, as well as a lasting friendship with my new friend. You see, as I got to know this young lady, I began to realize that she was a lot more like me than I had thought. This caused that barrier of prejudice in my life to begin to diminish.

From the ages of 14 to 17, I wanted to work with disabled people as a vocation. During that time, however, Christ was not at the center of my thinking. I began to walk with Jesus at the age of seventeen, in April of 1979. That started me on a journey of seeking to understand disability from a biblical perspective. My views about disability have taken about 18 years to fully develop. Also, when I started to walk with Jesus He not only intensified my desire to work with disabled people, but He also gave me a great concern and compassion for families and caregivers of the disabled.

I have come to understand disabilities in the context of three biblical categories: Creation, the Fall, and Redemption. Many Christian leaders, agreeing with the late Francis Schaeffer, have pointed out that the Lordship of Jesus cannot simply be restricted to our personal salvation, but must include all of life. As we seek to understand what Scripture says about a given topic and then implement its truth, we start to see redemption occur in a practical way. Just as the Fall has affected all of life, so redemption is to affect all of life for the better.

Now, I would like to share with you three views of disability. These three views are The Tragedy, The Rose Colored, and The Common Good views.

The Tragedy View

The Tragedy view is conveyed by statements such as “that person will only be a vegetable,” “what a burden for the family to have a child with a birth defect,” and “that person can never be a productive member of society.” All three of these statements reveal lack of trust in God. Romans 8:20 tells us that because of the Fall, we now experience frustration. These statements are ways to deal with frustration outside of the biblical framework. People who use these statements are living outside of a scriptural view point. In much the same way, people who make these remarks do so because, for whatever reasons, they do not view disabilities as something that God intervenes in and redeems.

I do not mind when people use words such as disabled or even handicapped. In fact, I think that when we try to use trendy words such as differently abled, or challenged, we miss the point, in that we fail to communicate what disabilities actually are.

There is one term I especially dislike: birth defect. I do not like this phrase because it fails to acknowledge God’s sovereignty. While it is true that disabilities are a result of the Fall of Man, the Bible also teaches us that God is still in control of all things (including disabilities.) That means that persons with disabilities are created by God with a purpose. Psalm 139:14, 15 proclaims that all of us are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Let us not forget God’s answer to Moses after Moses complained about his speech impediment: “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” (Exodus 4:11)

The Tragedy view of disability focuses almost entirely on the negative, and keeps us from seeing God’s hand, and His purposes in the lives of disabled people and their families.

The Rose Colored View

The next view is the Rose Colored view, which is represented by those who tell us that people who are retarded should always be treated according to their chronological age rather than their developmental age. This view tells us that we should enhance the image of people with disabilities in the eyes of non-disabled people. The way we are to go about doing this is to have them do as many activities as possible that non-disabled persons do, and as much as possible with non-disabled peers.

On a practical level, those who embrace this view of disability believe that although it is nice to have people without disabilities accept people with disabilities for who they are, it is not very effective. Therefore, in order to be the most effective in helping non-disabled people to accept and embrace persons with disabilities, we must help disabled persons learn to behave in ways that appeal to those who are without disabilities. It is argued that as disabled people learn to behave in ways that appeal to those who are not disabled, non disabled people will want good things for persons with disabilities.

As I consider this philosophy in light of biblical truth, it violates Scripture on many different fronts. The Rose Colored view advocates that we become respecters of persons. This view also contradicts how God calls us to view one another. I Samuel 16:7 tells us that man looks on the outside, but God looks at the heart. Scripture tells us that the strong are to bear the burdens of the weak. This is the opposite of the Rose Colored view. God calls his followers to be incarnational just as He was. We need to be incarnational in our ministry with people who are disabled. We need to enter into their world and understand their realities to the best of our ability. As Romans 12:15 says, we should mourn with those who mourn, and rejoice with those who rejoice.

Advocates of the Rose Colored view would have us believe the concept of mental ages is not a valid idea when it comes to interacting with people that are retarded. I would be the first to admit that a person cannot be defined by their mental age. However, that does not mean that we should throw out the baby with the bath water. I believe that the concept of mental ages is a providential tool that God has given to us. It helps us to understand people with mental limitations.

The Common Good View

The Common Good view acknowledges that disabilities are a product of the Fall. Disabilities are some of the innumerable consequences of Adam and Eve’s original sin (Genesis 3). The Common Good view assumes that it is right and good to ask in faith for God’s healing. However, if healing does not come in the way expected, that by no means indicates a lack of faith. We need to understand that although sin and its fruits were not part of God’s plan for humanity, the reason they are part of the human experience is because of God’s sovereignty. The Scriptures tell us in many places that evil is under God’s control. He does not cause evil (James 1:13). Rather, he permits evil to serve His own purpose. II Cor. 12:7-10 shows us this truth.

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me, 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 about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

We see the same truth reflected in the following texts: Exodus 4:11, Amos 3:6, Isaiah 45:7, John 9:1-3, and also in Jesus’ death and resurrection. We must rest in the truth of Romans 11:33-36 which says,

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God that God should repay him?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.

There are three ways in which God uses a disability. The first way is that He heals it. The second way is that He does something so significant through it that the only way to explain it is to acknowledge that it is a God thing. Two contemporary examples come to mind. One is the life of Joni Erickson Tada. Because of her injury, the body of Christ now has the opportunity to minister to persons affected by disabilities throughout our country and internationally. David Ring is my other example. He is a man with Cerebral Palsy who speaks across America, sharing his testimony about how God uses his disability. He has 200 speaking engagements per year.

In the third way, on the surface it seems as though the disability and the resulting suffering is all there is to it. In cases like these we need to remember Job. When in Job’s life it seemed as if nothing good was to come, there was a spiritual battle going on. Joni Eareckson Tada makes the point in her book, When God Weeps, that our response in this kind of suffering teaches us about the unseen realm. In fact, our response is a powerful statement to the powers and principalities that we are up against! (Ephesians 3:10)

As a child, I suffered from severe epilepsy and Cerebral Palsy. I was often hospitalized due to my seizures. When I was 13 years old I was healed. From that day on, I was delivered of my epilepsy, and I received clearance from my doctors to terminate the use of my epilepsy medications.

I have experienced God’s redemption in my life as he has used, and continues to use my disability to conform me more into the image of Jesus. It has helped me to be more compassionate and sympathetic to people who are in need. My disability has also helped me to look beyond the surface, to the deeper, underlying issues in people, and in life’s circumstances.

At times it seems that there is no bright side to having Cerebral Palsy. It is during these times that I identify with Job or the Apostle Paul, and rest in the sovereignty of God.

The Common Good view acknowledges that the Bible teaches that God is no respecter of persons. In God’s view, no person is more important than any other. This is clearly taught in Acts 10:34 and 17:25 see also James chapter 2. Because of this truth, we can rightfully conclude that people of all abilities are all part of the promise of Genesis 12:3.

Psalm 127:3 tells us that children are gifts. From this foundational truth we can rightfully conclude that all people are to play a significant role in God’s world. There are no exceptions! Disabilities often make it hard to see people as gifts. However, according to Scripture, God promises to give his grace in hard times and declares that we can do all things through Him. (Phil 4:13)

The Apostle Paul suffered from what he referred to as a “thorn in his flesh” in 2 Corinthians 2:7-10. At first he prayed that the Lord would remove this thorn. Finally, God changed his perspective. Paul realized that God was up to something. There is a bigger picture, even if from our human perspective we cannot see it. Paul realized this, and rejoiced in his weakness, that God might receive the glory.


Rick Eastin is on staff with Evangelicals for Social Action in Fresno, California. He is also a ministry associate with Central California Joni and Friends

Recommended Reading:

When God Weeps: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty
by Joni Eareckson Tada and Steven Estes
Zondervan, 2000

A Step Further: Growing Closer to God through Hurt and Hardship
by Joni Eareckson Tada and Steven Estes
Zondervan, 1980

All God’s Children: A Guide to Enabling the Disabled
by Joni Eareckson Tada and Gene Newman
HarperCollins, 1992

Reconciling Two Different Models of Disability

Rick Eastin

February 2013

To start out, I’d like to give you a little bit of my background. I myself am a person with Cerebral Palsy. For me it has been a life-long disability. As a result of this, I started to attend a Special Education School for persons with disabilities in the early 1960s, in Oakland, California. While I was at that school, I did not have a whole lot of interaction with students who were developmentally delayed until the last year when I was age 14. Through a series of circumstances, I got to know a young adult and that began to introduce me into the world of people with developmental delays. Upon further reflection, I then understood that I had more exposure to persons with developmental delays that I previously realized. Right across the street from my school was a place for students with severe and profound disabilities.

At age 17, God drew me back to Himself. As I began to walk with Jesus, I began a process of trying to understand my time at the Special Education school. It was a time of reconciling how God was at work in my life during that timeframe. I started to understand that even in the most difficult of situations God is always at work, even though there are seldom “nice and easy” answers.

Also at age 17, I began to study the field of intellectual disabilities. This study continues to be a life-long pursuit of mine. I eventually attended California State University-Fresno where I earned a BA degree in Social Work. Also, from 1987 to 2002, I founded and directed a program at my local Church that dealt primarily with adults having intellectual disabilities.

In addition, a personal blessing to me came about through the reestablishment in 1986 of the friendship relationship with the young adult mentioned above whom I had befriended at my original school in Oakland. I had many opportunities to be of encouragement to her for the next 22 years.

The 1970s were times of great transition in the field of intellectual disabilities. A consensus started to emerge that, because people with intellectual disabilities had been so badly mistreated and under-represented in society, that there needed to be a great effort to try as much as possible to begin to right some of the wrongs that had been done.

A new paradigm began to emerge that said “intellectual disability often causes people who had this disability to behave in ways that the broader society does not find rewarding. Therefore, we need to work hard at attempting to get such people to behave in ways that the dominant culture would find rewarding”. The desired end result would be that people with disabilities would be treated in a better manner.

Although this approach has the noblest of intentions in that its anticipated outcomes include the improvement of the treatment of people affected by disabilities, too often this philosophy ends up overlooking the very nature of the disability itself. By this I mean that in our contemporary society we often end up painting an overly optimistic picture that is simply not based in reality.

Now I want to turn your attention to what Scriptures says about disabilities. In order to do this, I will be looking at this topic through the three categories of the Creation, the Fall, and Redemption. To start with, Scripture informs us that when God first created Adam and Eve there was complete and total bliss. But we find that once Adam and Eve disobeyed God, that resulted in pain and suffering being injected into God’s Creation. Part of the judgment that God issued because of the Fall was telling Adam that there would be thorns and thistles that would now be a part of his life, thereby extending to all humanity. The ‘thorns and thistles’ represent the many varied ways in which life is either hard and/or works against us.

Disabilities are one of the many manifestations of the Fall with which we have to contend.

God promises according to Romans 8:28 that He will work all things together for our good, for those of us who are in Christ Jesus. This means that even though disabilities can be very painful as they affect the individual, the family, and society as a whole, God will work through these difficult circumstances to reveal Himself. This also means that in every life, even though we may experience great difficulties as a result of disabilities, nothing is ever wasted; God can redeem it all.

Now I want to look at what I call God’s Redemptive Design of disability. I want to set this within the context of Exodus 4:10-11, and Job 2:10. Both of these Scriptures inform us that God is in control, even when He appears to withhold resources from us that we think we need. This is what happens when we encounter or are faced with disability. It appears that we lack the needed resources to be able to have a good life. But evidently, based on these two Scriptures, God sees things differently. God gives us individually exactly what we need; it is our job to partner with Him in the process of trying to ‘unpack’ the design He has for us.

When we apply these truths to persons with intellectual disabilities, we must come to the conclusion that God has a plan for these individuals as well. At times, that plan often goes against what our current culture thinks is ‘the good life’.

God has created us all in such a way that every one of us goes through what is known as ‘developmental stages’. Typically, persons without disabilities follow a very predictable progression through these stages. However, people with intellectual disabilities often get ‘stuck’ at a development stage from which they do not advance. This is what makes their life experience so different from people without intellectual disabilities. But in the field of intellectual disabilities, the culture evidently has decided that it does not like this way of dealing with disabilities, not because it’s not based in reality, but many simply do not like, or feel comfortable with, the results it yields.

I want to examine disability from two perspectives; on one hand, we are called by God to attempt to make things better and not simply accept things as they are. The classic illustration of this is in the Parable of Good Samaritan. The person who helped the individual in need surely did not leave things as they were. In the same way, we are called to attempt to help all people develop to their fullest. As St. Irenaeus said in the Second Century, “The Glory of God is Man fully alive”.

On the other hand, we need to also, not only accept, but embrace the limitations that God in His providence gives to us. What this means to people with developmental delays is that yes, we are to challenge them as we would all people to develop to their fullest potential, while at the same time embracing the limitations that come with intellectual disability.

In the field of intellectual disability, there is a great push to have non-disabled people to have good social perceptions of these persons. The reasoning behind this is that it is believed that if people have a good mental image of these individuals they will be treated better by their non-disabled counterparts. But we have to be very careful about how we proceed down this path of reasoning. It comes down to what I call “truth in advertising”; if God designed us with a disability, it just stands to reason that it is not His intention that we would spend so much energy on trying to prevent others to perceive us as not having the disability!

God has given people with intellectual disabilities a platform by which he or she is a facet of who God is. But often this platform comes in the form of two socially devalued roles. One of these roles is that of being perceived as a child or child-like, even though one is of an adult age chronologically. The other role is that of an object of pity. It is a fact, whether we like it or not, that often adults with intellectual disabilities remain do at a child’s level intellectually and that cannot be changed. Also, as a person with a disability myself, I know what it is like to have people be overly sympathetic to the point where it is just “too much”. However, that does not mean we should ‘throw out the baby with the bath water’. God has created us in such a way that when we encounter the brokenness of a disability, especially the more severe it is, we feel pity for that person. This is a God-given response to what we see.

In our service to people who are intellectually disabled, we need to actively pursue how God has designed such persons to function in His world in a redemptive manner.

I would like to now highlight three different places that work with people with intellectual disabilities where they are embracing people according to God’s design for them. The results are truly remarkable.

First is Break the Barriers which is headquartered in Fresno, California. This is an amazing program where people with and without disabilities engage in gymnastics together. The results at that program are nothing short of remarkable. They have performed at local half-times for various sporting events, traveled to Washington DC to showcase their talents, as well as even doing some international travel. They have been to South Africa, Romania, and China to date.

The next program I am highlighting is Central California Mennonite Residential Services. This is a program that provides supportive live-in services for adults with developmental disability. In this community, the abled and disabled share life together. Individuals affected by disabilities also receive the needed support from the staff, helping all residents meet their own personal needs and achieve their own goals. Jen Foster, the Executive Director, has a favorite saying; “We are better together than alone”. This reflects an attitude not of independence, but rather interdependence.

The third organization I would like to highlight is called Shepherd’s Ministries, located in Wisconsin. They are a residential ministry for people with developmental delays, and I must admit I have only read about them online. Nevertheless, I am truly impressed with what I have read. They have a concept that I believe is rather unique to them, called ‘appropriate independence’. There is a rather lengthy article that is available online about this approach. Shepherd’s Ministries have shown much original thinking about how to apply God’s Truth while serving the everyday lives of people with disabilities.

As Christians, we have been called by God, not only to be reconciled to Himself through Jesus Christ, but we have also been given the ministry of reconciliation. What this means is, that as Christians, we need to seek on a continuing basis how to bring God’s Truth to bear in the realm of how we live with people with intellectual disabilities in God’s sin-marred world. We are called to be salt and light in this arena as was our Lord.

 

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And we knthat in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. – Romans 8:28

# Moses said to the Lord, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?—Exodus 4:10-11

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He replied, “You are talking like a foolish[

^{a] woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” In all this, Job did not sin in what he said. – Job 2:10ow that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. – Romans 8:28}

# Moses said to the Lord, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?—Exodus 4:10-11

# He replied, “You are talking like a foolish[^{a] woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” In all this, Job did not sin in what he said. – Job 2:10}