My son Ben holds tightly to the tissue-paper torch at his Special Olympics meet. He should be settled in a career by now, I think, raising a family and making his mark on the world. But instead he clutches this small honor like it is the real Olympic torch, eyes bright with the seriousness of his duty. His participation in this small Special Olympics ceremony in front of a few parents and caregivers pierces my heart, but it also shouts a message in the afternoon sunshine: I am important. I matter.

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You might have gotten the diagnosis beforehand, when the beautiful process of growth in the womb turned fearful. Or maybe it happened like it did for us, entering the hospital with excitement, only to discover something terribly wrong in the delivery room. Or perhaps it was a few years later, when you began to notice that something wasn’t quite right.

However it happened, however you learned of it, disability entered your world, unexpected and unwelcome.

The experts stepped in with testing; therapies; interventions. You learned enough vocabulary and biology for a graduate degree in a field you have no interest in. People call you a saint. A superwoman. But you are just a mother, giving her life over for her child as mothers have always done, only in new and frightening ways.

We had thought that things like this happen to other mothers. To those specially gifted for it. Not to us, the ordinary ones with our struggles and sins. But here we are, in all our fears and shortcomings, gifted with what seems an impossible task.

Like the snake in Eden’s foliage, disability hisses: Did God really say?There are no pat answers in the face of disability. No skirting around the questions. The doubts. Like the proverbial elephant in the room, the presence of disability demands an accounting of us. Of our assumptions. Our prejudices. Our faith.

So we wrestle with theologies of intentional design vs. a fallen world, stretching to lay hold of answers that lie hidden in providence until like Job we admit that some things are just too wonderful for us to know.

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
‭‭John‬ ‭9‬:‭1‬-‭3‬

The works of God. Everything changes when we turn from demanding answers to looking for the works of God. For the blind man it was a testimony to the power and authority of God residing in the poor rabbi from Nazareth. What will it be for our child?

Years of higher education cannot compare to the visceral theology of a disability diagnosis. We are forced to tread the Gospel road of humility, where the way is rough, but holy. We learn to guard and guide our child in the beauty of their brokenness, and ours.

We who long desperately for simple healing can miss the transformative miracles brought about through our child’s presence in this world. They, who may lack the ability to do anything the world deems useful, carry the uncanny gift of changing us, their neediness calling forth a reckoning with the God we were in danger of ignoring or trivializing before they came.

They rescue us from an unexamined life. From purposelessness. From the hard grip of selfishness. They are living object lessons, revealing the kingdom to those of us who formerly wandered in the fog of safe belief and simplistic answers. Are these not the works of God?

The audacity of disability is that it insists on making a place for miracles in a world desperately trying to snuff them out. That it bursts into our safe and ordinary lives to display the glory of God in a hundred unexpected ways.

The audacity of disability means that we are stewards of the works of a God who deems his glory to be best displayed in weakness.

The audacity of disability lies in finding that we are the ones clutching tissue paper glory, while Ben and the other weak ones hold high the blazing, burning torches that light our way home.