How Can We Nurture Hope For Today And The Future?
I have been in a wheelchair since I was 15 years old. It took me several years after my spinal cord injury to gain my independence. Maybe I was just naïvee or blinded by my own pride; but I never thought I would loose the independence I fought so hard gain. Time had other plans.
A few years ago I badly injured my shoulder tearing several of the muscles in my left arm, I lost many of the abilities I had that brought my independence. I was "disabled" again and I struggled to see hope from my hospital bed all the while being isolated in a sterile room during the pandemic. With reconstructive surgery and complications due to a pressure wound, I would spend near the next year and a half confined to my bed. I felt very alone and my world had shrunk to the size of my iPhone screen. Hope had become but a distant memory.
One of my favourite quotes comes from Marcel Poust who once said:
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
It reminded me during that time that hope comes not from a destination or state of perceived normality in my life or abilities. Hope is revealed in the stillness of wonder and awe to the transformation of becoming who God desires me to be. Having new eyes is a willing submission to find yourself in a bigger story that transcends the smallness of your world.
Perhaps this is not an exhaustive list. But here are a few possible lenses or eyes which I have found can reveal hope for today and the future.
Innovative Participation & Not Isolation
Over the last several years, many have begun to explore deeper what it means to be a part of community. Particularly, the online expressions, culture, and technologies that foster belonging and communal engagement. Church is no longer just an online streaming of the Sunday service. People desire online participation in communal activity.
Some statistics are:
98% of people who belong to an online group say they feel a sense of belonging to that group.
77% say the most important group they are part of now operates online.
As a result of the pandemic, 74% of community programs reported an increased recognition of their value – 62% of communities experienced an increase in engagement, with 17% of those seeing a significant increase.
As a disabled person, I recognize the difficulty to manage my health needs and fulfill my deep desire for community in my life. Allowing for new eyes to embrace innovative participation in online communities has brought a vision for hope in what and who matters today and in the future. Rather then withdraw into a seclusion of self doubt and emotional loss, I seek new relational encounters that show hope through online connectivity.
Inclusiveness not Segregation
Since I was young, I have always been dismayed by the "placard" mentality I've experienced in many communities. Accessibility and communal involvements have always seemed segregated to the "Disabled" or “Special Needs” label of inclusion. By limiting the experience we as disabled people can have in society, hope seems at a distance bordered by ableist illusions of participation and the unrecognized or unfulfilled role of influence we can have in an integrated community.
Some of the most hope felt experiences I have had in inclusion over the years have come from communities who embrace my participation and transform the physical and social accessibility of their activities so that I can take part in amongst the diversity of their members. I am not separated to just a visible world of the disabled but, participating and even leading at times in the world of those with unseen disabilities.
Small Steps Towards Change
I remember in the mid 80's when Rick Hansen accomplished the unbelievable and wheeled around the world in his Man In Motion Tour. Actually, I can still recall his theme song while singing it to myself as I type these words. Truth be told, following my shoulder injury a few years ago, I wrote him a letter which prompted a phone call with him before my reconstructive surgery. It was an inspiration as we spoke about his recovery following a similar injury.
It seems I have always wanted to move mountains to inspire hope in others. It wasn't enough for Jesus to die on the cross for the world. I wanted to die for the world, too. Maybe you have felt similar in the expectations you place upon yourself.
Miroslav Volf points to the reality that those kind of expectations are unreal in the course of a life truly well lived. He wisely points out:
“Life isn’t a series of crises calling for Heroic Moral Deeds. Most of the time, it’s a series of small, seemingly insignificant decisions and nondecisions. It’s made up of habits and assumptions and incremental changes. The shape of who we are and how we live isn’t like Stonehenge. It’s not made by stacking a few massive rocks on top of one another. It’s built up over time, brick by brick.”
— Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, et al.
Seeing hope in a life of disability means recognizing a high bar of expectation is not found in measuring our lives through others eyes. Rather, God's glory is revealed through the smaller acts of recognizing our own character and identity pursuing a relationship with our creator here and now within. Pursuing hope through self care and seeking our own daily needs provides an empowerment of overwhelming confidence and well-being which ripples in the witness to others beyond our own understanding.
I love the way my friend Jenn Rombeek Burnett describes this freeing hope while I leave you with her words from a devotion she wrote a few months ago:
“I’m resetting the bar to the high place it was meant to be, rather than to the lower standard I have justified through more complicated reasoning, which have truly just been excuses. A little surprisingly, I’m finding this an incredibly empowering process because while the world feels overwhelmingly out of control, I’m choosing afresh to control the only person Jesus ever tasked me with managing: myself. And as I yield to this refining, I’m declaring afresh the simple truth that God is Creator, Re-creator and Lord of all.”
— Jenn Rombeek Burnett in 'An Invitation To Uncomplicated Obedience'