I listened to Heather Kirn Lanier and Bishop Curry in a beautiful conversation about disability and parenting and what it means to believe that we each are beloved as we are and that was awesome. But it also led me to Lanier’s essay for America Magazine about Jesus and healing and disability from 2017 which was also lovely and true and helpful.

It doesn’t get much better than this final paragraph: 

“I do not want anyone to ‘fix’ my kid. That is not the miracle I seek.

“Instead, I want someone to lay hands on the people who presume she is less than. I want someone to eradicate the idea that bodies are either productive or burdensome, that they either contribute to the gross domestic product or drain it. I want someone to lay hands on the president for doing what an apologist later called ‘the classic retard.’ I want some mystical savior to eradicate the assumption that disability is a curse, a calamity.

“Wouldn’t that be the bigger miracle?”

If there’s anything we are invited to consider when we approach Jesus as a healer, it is the places in our own bodies and souls that need to be healed. The places of grief and wounding, the places of prejudice and defensiveness, the places of hatred and fear and shame.

And, as Lanier writes, the miracle is in the truth that healing is available for each of us and for all of us in exactly those places.

More with Amy Julia:

• S5 E1 | How Disability Taught Me the Goodness of Vulnerability with Heather Lanier
• What’s Wrong With Having Down Syndrome?
• Talking About Disability
• Friday Favorites and AJB Recommends

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