Christmas Eve 2022. That feels like a line from the future or the Jetsons or something. We can’t possibly be nearly a quarter through the 21^st century. I don’t know about you all but some of this year feels like it creaked along and I was stuck in the middle of. . . well. . . I don’t even know what that was. Other times it seems that the year has flown by and everything has just fallen into place. It is weird how life can be these extremes at the same time. I think the older I get the more comfortable I am getting with these paradoxes.

 

Tonight I shared a quick Christmas story thought at Liberty Vineyard after we played this crazy game that got people all jazzed up. I had no idea that people would get so into it. Basically people from all generations were opening Christmas gifts with oven mitts. Who knew? 😊 In response to the Christmas narrative, I was drawn to the imagination and how what it must have ben like to experience first hand some of these events we hear in December year after year. The stories have been told for over 2000 years now across the globe and hearing and telling that story once more felt like holy, holy ground. Still the story keeps us imagining, engaging, wondering.

 

The paradoxes of the Christmas story are immense.

A baby. . . . a King.

Glory. . . . humility. 

The miracle of life. . . massacre of innocent children.

A dark night. . . the star of Bethlehem.

A Savior. . . .a people oppressed and lost.

Hope. . . hopeless.

Love. . . hate and evil.

An empire of oppression. . . a Kingdom bringing liberation.

 

The list could go on. Christ came. He is with us. The paradox of Jesus intersects with our own.

 

The last few years have been a time of my life where I have been able to enjoy the rewards of years of labor, all stemming from the grace of the Christ child. These years though have also been a season of some of my darkest nights. Both are happening simultaneously. No wonder people in our world are so anxious. It is tough to take in the range of experiences that come our way. I am so thankful this Christmas, and every moment, that Christ is our peace. . . .the Prince of Pease. He makes sense out of the paradoxes and brings meaning to what I often conclude as meaningless.

 

So here I am again, imagining. . . entering into this story afresh. In the darkest nights and the mountain crests, Jesus is King. The image of God gets reflected in such ordinary, humble ways. This is Christmas. Merry Christmas 2022. . . now and into the future. 😊

 

 

 

In 2012 during the Sandy Hook shooting, Charity and I were staying in a village about an hour from Kathmandu doing some Nepali language learning. We had intentionally disconnected from the outside world to throw ourselves into language and not be distracted. We found out about the massacre at least a week after it occurred. We were not around America to see and hear the outcry and that week still seems like a bit of a blur as we just didn’t have the emotional presence to really sympathize.

 

Ten years later, a similar event has unfolded and I no longer sit in a remote village. I am having difficulty expressing the pain I feel over the Robb Elementary School Massacre. I have sat in silence staring straight ahead for minutes at a time as I grieve. 

 

So much has changed for me since Sandy Hook. We returned to the US for several months after that village stay in Nepal only to return to the Himalayas to live permanently. I lost my mom suddenly in our first months there. Our boy was born in Kathmandu. We transitioned back to the US sooner than expected. Being without children for so many years afforded us a lot of flexibility in life and ministry but events like the ones flashing across my phone screen have shaken me up to new levels now that we have a child. 

 

When we returned from Nepal we moved to a neighborhood with high crime as it was affordable for many newly arriving Bhutanese-Nepali refugees. I don’t think I fully realized the depth of despair and violence while I was there. There were multiple shootings around our house in those days. A good friend from our church had her 11-year-old son murdered right in front of her in a likely botched drug interaction. Her teenage son was shot as well and we sat with her hearing the aftermath of coping with this news. It was all over the media. Last year another member of that same small house church was tragically killed at point blank range by her boyfriend. Now, many miles from that neighborhood, we often hear gunfire throughout the night. A few months ago Charity was talking with a neighbor who had gotten hit by a stray bullet just a few buildings over. We call the police often.

 

Part of me wonders how in all these years of chaos that we have been spared. How have we been this fortunate compared to kids in Uvalde. . . grandparents in Buffalo. . . students at Parkland. . . Columbine. . . Virginia Tech. . .  . . . the list goes on. Very time I hear a shot I tense up. Every. Single Time. How do you stay vigilant as a blind guy when the first time you notice anything is once the shots are fired? I was less than 100 feet away from shots last November and I thought it was over. Imagining 10-year-olds not just tensing up or wondering if these were their last moments on earth but actually discovering that fate leaves me in deep sadness.

 

What is the appropriate response? More security? Gun laws? Arming teachers? More prayer? Everyone suddenly becoming godly. More mental health screening? So many are processing and grasping for something, anything really to deal with this atrocity. Did the police wait too long? Did they have misinformation? We all have a grenade in our hands wanting to throw it in the right place to once and for all rid our society of this cancer but I’m not so sure most of us know where to throw it. As I read the quick responses, the grasping for meaning, the outrage – it is just hard to read. It feels like our grenades of good intentions are just timing out and are just exploding in our hands. Where do we go from here?

 

I don’t know.

 

I still need more time to feel what I didn’t feel ten years ago. I sit in silence not as a trite response but simply to try to steady myself in the midst of such chaos. I mourn with those in the Uvalde community, knowing that mourning will one day have to end and true justice  sought. This stuff isn’t going away. For today though I don’t have answers.

 

I read through the book of Psalms this week. I am going to stay here for a while. Despair, hope, triumph, loss – this is worship. I am learning to worship from a place that feels pretty rough right now. Psalm 121 is where I keep returning, though even in this there are so many questions:

I lift my eyes up to the mountains. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip. He who watches over you will not slumber .Indeed he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord watches over you. The Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun will not harm you by day nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all harm. He will watch over your life. The Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.

 

 

 

During our five years in the Carrick neighborhood of Pittsburgh, our family did everything possible to make Jesus known through all things neighborly. Our son Amos was just 1 when we arrived, and we would push him up and down the hills in his little stroller as we made our way down the community’s main corridor, Brownsville Road.  A couple years after we were there a family of five moved in a few doors down. A mom, Rachel, grandmother Cecille, and three kids, Jamal, Travis, and Sarah. There was no husband around and we quickly befriended Rachel and she became a dear friend over our last several years there.

We originally met Rachel when we did a pizza at the park event at the little park right behind our place. I remember talking for quite some time with her as Charity introduced Amos to her. Amos spent several days each week at the library with Rachel’s kids as he got older, and we would often walk back and forth to the library together. Once when Rachel was trying to make ends meet and work during the time her kids returned home, she checked with Charity and I to see if we could watch the kids during this time. She wanted to make sure they had a place to go, and she trusted us.

Little by little Rachel and her family got more involved with our church. They came to our place for house church a couple of times and were regularly at the community dinners we put on. We would talk often in the front yard or stop by one another’s homes just to say hello. 

When Rachel learned that I had taken a job down in Atlanta she seemed sad, but she knew that it was right for our family. She knew that we were in transition and needed to do what was best for us. Rachel was the last person in Pittsburgh who said goodbye to us before loading up our car and driving away. 

Charity found the news article first. A fatal gunshot had killed someone in our old neighborhood during the wee hours last Saturday morning. This is all too common news for the neighborhood. The grip of violence, drugs, and despair is known amongst so many beautiful, hopeful signs. I never got used to this contrast during our years there. So much hope. So much friendship. . . . yet so much despair. I continued to read the article. I knew the street. It was just a few blocks away and I had walked that street often. The article read that it was a homicide, and a woman was laying in the street with a bullet wound to the head. I kept reading. It was Rachel. What was she doing there at that time of night? Why did the article say she was getting dropped off to urinate there when she was literally 4 or so blocks from her house? What really happened? Rachel Warner. Rachel Warner.  I kept reading over the name again and again. Rachel Warner. 

Then it hit me. Sarah was just 8 years old. Travis is 10. Jamal is now 17. They have no mom now. Can their grandma take care of them? Can their ad be involved? “She was doing so much better I thought.”

She was getting on her feet and the hope of Jesus had come to her house. Now she was gone. Rachel Warner was murdered ruthlessly in the streets of my old neighborhood just blocks from where she lived.

Charity and I have been through some stuff. We have seen tragedy, loss, and evil knock on our door. Within a 6-block radius of our old house were multiple shootings, frequent sightings of prostitution, multiple fires started intentionally, drug overdoses galore. . . we called the police often. There was a lot of darkness. We have lost people we have known to violence before. We have known the scar of sin that weaved its way through our neighborhood. But not Rachel. She was the least likely of people that you would think this would happen to. She was a good, good mom. She was so exceedingly kind. 

Charity and I fell in love with Carrick during our time there. We fell so in love with it in fact that we named our ministry/church, Love Carrick. In a neighborhood that has experienced brokenness and decay over the last decades, there are so many Rachels. So many good neighbors who genuinely care for each other and do the best they can do with what they have been dealt. There are heroes on every single block in the neighborhood who continually model what friendship, hard work, and compassion looks like. Rachel was one of them. 

Rachel, I wish we could have said goodbye. I wish it did not end this way. I know full well that the enemy of our souls will not relent. He truly is a thief desiring to kill and destroy (Jn. 10:10). My heart breaks for the Warner family. Charity and I will not be the same. But this is also a war ground. This battle was costly and devastating. The war isn’t over. Death will not get the last word.  I know the other part of the story. In the face of oppression and evil, there is new life. This world cannot be the end. There must be a new world. I look through hope at that place where God will make all things new. May Rachel, the kids, and everyone grieving during this time fix there gaze not on what is seen, but what is unseen. I say goodbye with hope. 

This is a hope to see you again, yes, but it is also a violent hope that will do everything through the resurrection power of Christ to see Satan’s kingdom thrown down in places where he has attempted to set up his reign. May the love of Jesus not go out in Carrick, in Clarkston, in the lives of those where the darkness is so very dark. This violent hope destroys Satan’s work, and we are down today but we will rise. Oh God, protect these young kids and allow your hope to burn so very bright during such loss.

A picture is worth a thousand words. If you can see it, yes, that is true. If that picture cannot be seen, it is worth nothing. The disabled and the able-bodied have very different ways they experience the world. They will inevitably have different ways in which they join Jesus in mission. Lines are drawn in every facet of our society – race, intellect, class, politics, personality – we divide ourselves in every way we possibly can. But what about disability? Is this a problem too for the Church? Do able-bodied folks and the disabled stand on opposite sides of the dividing line. Listen to an open letter from one mission leader who happens to be blind. Imagine God’s renewed community on mission together.

Dear Able-Bodied Church,

Most of you like me. We hang out all the time and you tell me how engaging I am in conversation. You get comfortable with me and even begin to joke that I don’t look blind or seem like I have a visual disability. You can sometimes lament that it is almost like you are talking to a normal person. Thank you. Normal is what I was going for.

Though we are mostly comfortable together in church and community, some of you make some serious mistakes. You often circle all the people around me in times of socializing without extending a welcoming word or introduction. My lack of eye contact feels like no contact at all. I ache to be seen yet I am unseen. Oh, but I don’t want him to feel uncomfortable you say. I am concerned that you won’t be able to do this or that. You have a lot of fears about me. Can you just relax a little bit? Put your hand on your belly, take a deep breath, breathe. Welcome me the way that Jesus told us to welcome all to the banqueting table.

I get that I live in a sighted world. 24 hours a day I am reminded that the world was made for the sighted, not for the blind. Almost daily someone approaches me to ask me what I can see. My answer is never satisfactory. I wish I knew what the answer was supposed to be. It is all so exhausting. I don’t know if this is realistic but I long for the day when the community of the King, the Church, begins to write a different story. No doubt that there are so many sectors of society who have nailed it when it comes to inclusion and welcome. Without hesitation, I admit that I have ventured into places, organizations, and work sites that were as accessible as anyone would dream. 

I wonder though if accessibility and accommodation is really the point of Jesus’ message on disability. Can a community of Christ in rural Nepal or the jungles of the Amazon who have no understanding of all the gadgets and current inclusion protocol still get this thing right? This can’t just be about American disability policy or being current. I don’t just want accommodation; I long to join Jesus on mission with you. I am asking you – honestly, yet boldly asking you to start smoking what you are selling. As a mission leader I know what radical welcome looks like. I have tasted the sweetness of no more us and them. I have rarely seen or felt that though as a blind guy in Christian community. I have felt welcomed but rarely have I felt equal. Is it too much to ask that all our hands are in the pile together and there is a seat at the table for me?

I am speaking in general terms because I think you are struggling to understand some of the weightier matters. Braille handouts, emailing slide shows, describing what is on a screen – yes, surely that would be nice and helpful. Paint the picture on the challenges of any disability and we try to resolve them with practical answers. You tend to think of these solutions first. They aren’t bad ideas at all but for many disabled in your communities, it is not pragmatics that will ultimately form us for mission. There are advocates all around the world who have rattled the cage for these kinds of solutions, and I applaud them. What I hope you gain from hearing me out in this letter though is a shift in ethos. I don’t just want to be accommodated, protected, or for your programs to be easy for me to access – I want to be on mission with Jesus with you. Do you think you have the courage to walk with me to see that happen?

Disabled scholar and ministry leader, Miriam Spies calls for the making of space for people like me when she writes, “There needs to be an intentional creation of space. It is not about moving those from the margins to the center but transforming how we understand the center and power. And with that, we all grow in identifying ourselves as disciples participating in and offering leadership in God’s mission.”

[i] I am humbly asking for space to be made. I know it is not intuitive or effortless to do so. Mission never is.  

Ultimately, we both know that this is not mostly about me. It isn’t even mostly about all the disabled or marginalized people who will become part of your community. This is mostly about Christ and His Kingdom. Together we have a chance to get this right and reflect the matchless Kingdom of God to the world. Truly, you have made so much progress. Even in my lifetime I have watched things shift from being the guy that everyone needed to see healed so He could feel like a whole person. Now the dial has moved towards over-protection and not wanting to do the wrong thing. Your love and heart is not the problem. You have shown me again and again that is in the right place. Do not be discouraged by my tone but I am weary – many on the margins are weary. We want someone to listen before espousing solutions. 

Perhaps you know Dr. Amos Yong or have read some of his stuff on disability. Amos has a brother with down syndrome and has made some great contributions in disability studies for the church. One thing that he wrote a few years ago that has helped me is the reminder that it is not the disabled who have an issue with their disability. It is often the constant reminders that they are given from the broader culture that they somehow don’t belong or are in need of being rightly put together again.[ii] I am pleading with you not to make this assumption but to work with me hand in hand to announce and demonstrate Christ in your community. I am up for it. Let’s soar together and if we fall, we will fall together. But please, please don’t relegate my contribution in the body of Christ to be one of sitting on the sidelines simply because you are uncomfortable or are unsure what the outcome will be.

On behalf of my disabled brothers and sisters who long to be on mission with you as full participants, I don’t have a long list of suggestions to make. Many people in your community have already figured out accommodations to make our lives a little less stressful. You can take a visit to local businesses and corporations to learn some of the beautiful ways they are making things accessible for the disabled.  Surely, we have a long way to go even with these cosmetics, but I think the issue is more than cosmetic. It is spiritual. The Cross and mission of Jesus must be accessible. I am asking for a Kingdom vision. 

·       We are all image bearers of God. “Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image” (Gen. 1:26). If you do not give us a chance to lead, serve, and attempt things for the Lord through the local church we are robbed of our God-given design to be image bearers. 

·       We are one body and each person a necessity. The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So, it is with Christ. . .. those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 22). I know you know this but would you dare to imagine with me that those on the margins can be contributors of God’s mission of the Church and not merely recipients of benevolence?

·       Christ established a new humanity at the Cross. The imagery of no more “us and them” is so powerfully penned in Ephesians when Paul speaks of none of us being strangers or foreigners any longer. We are all part of God’s household; we are God’s family (Eph. 2:19-20) Regardless of your choice to hear this plea or not, it will not change the facts. We are all part of God’s family. With your influence and position, would you jump in on what God has already revealed in this upside-down Kingdom?

Brothers and sisters, (that is truly who you are to me), there is a lot at stake. The very nature and integrity of the mission of Jesus is on the line if we are not all participants. May we be able to join in profound and breath-taking ways to see the magnificence of Jesus roll through our communities. I love you. I care for you. You are my family. Let’s join together to get this thing done as Christ intended.

With hope,

Your brother and friend who happens to be blind 

[1]Miriam Spies, “Making Space, Offering Voice: Leadership of People with Disabilities in God’s Mission” International Review of Missions June 18, 2019 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/irom.12259 Last Accessed March 15, 2019 

[1] Amos Yong, The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishers, 2011, Kindle Location 167-220.

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[i]Miriam Spies, “Making Space, Offering Voice: Leadership of People with Disabilities in God’s Mission” International Review of Missions June 18, 2019 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/irom.12259 Last Accessed March 15, 2019 2[ii] Amos Yong, The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishers, 2011, Kindle Location 167-220.