One of the biggest hoops that the disabled and their caregivers have to hop through in the Indian landscape is the obsession for perfection. Since the time of our adoption, I have met several who have indicated this subconscious obsession, unbeknownst to themselves, one way or another. A parent talks to me about their desire to adopt and finds in me a favourable ally, until they utter these unfortunate words, “But we want ours normal, ok?” Another parent was excited to see A on the wheelchair basketball team, and when enquiring details about the same, makes it a point to say, “But I want my son in a normal team, ok?” Or how about this one which hits home for many: children and strangers walk up to me, sympathetic-eyed but sincerely desiring to make friends with Abhi, and then ask him this face-palm of a question, “What is wrong with you beta?” Perhaps you have thought these same things, albeit quietly in the corner of your mind. Perhaps it never struck you as an odd comment or question, until now. But it is not normal. Our world is obsessed with perfection. It is part of our collective psyche.
Think about it. We want perfect, luscious, blemishless babies in our wombs so much so that the moment the doctor lets out that ‘something is not right’ with the baby, we weep and wail as though our world has come crashing down. We want perfect scores for our kids and centums in board exams that anything less is met with emotions ranging from rage to, “it’s ok” almost as if they lost a war. Our sons have to be the crown of our heads, never the sandals for our feet. We want a seat in the best colleges and workplaces that we go to atrocious lengths to be ‘in the club’. We want the perfect match in life, the perfect scene for the engagement, the perfect wedding moments, the perfect insta-shot. We kill ourselves to perfection.
Everything around us spins undistorted on our own axis, until someone comes spinning the opposite way and we ask, “What’s wrong with you?” all the while assuming that our world is running the right way. But it is not. What is wrong with us? Everything.
Normal is a misnomer for our off-spinning world.
Since Adam’s fall in the Garden, this world is a living aberration. Sin has marred perfection, and distorted our reality. We have come to believe the lie that the world is essentially good with elements of evil, not that we are utterly corrupt in toto and in need of redemption(Rom 3:9-18). We are an abnormal world with deeply broken people with whom we brush shoulders everyday, except they seem to mask it well. Your son’s classmate is probably suffering from bullying in his school and is suicidal at times. Your friend may have a secret porn addiction stemming from her perennial need for felt affection. Your own children may be lonely and exploring substances to heal their deep wounds. If this is likely true of our village, children who have been adopted or fostered have even deeper behavioral issues stemming from a traumatized childhood. Our neighbours are heard fighting often and we assume it’s all part of “normal family life”. Divorce has become normal. Unnatural and uncovenanted sexual acts have become normal. Smoking and drinking and porn issues have become normal. But the child on the wheelchair is not normal. How did we even get here?
Jesus walked this corroded earth, and he never once said, “Welcome to the normal”. It grieved his heart to see people without a shepherd (Matt 9:36), and moved with compassion he healed the sick, mended the lame and raised the dead (Matt 14:14, Lk7:14). He dined more with anomalies and aberrations in his society than he did at the privileged perfectionist club. He never once asked, “What’s wrong with you?” to the lame, the adulteress or the leprous but responded to their requests with utter grace. When the Pharisees brought an adulteress woman to Jesus to see if he would “get rid of her”, he challenged the righteous stone-pelters, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”(Jn 8:7) In effect Jesus was saying, “She is not the problem here, you are.” Jesus leveled the playing field. He turned the world right-side up. He saved people from their sinful off-spinning. And if we are to see people the way Jesus saw them, we need to change our orientation and fit into Jesus’ normal world, not expect the have-nots to fit into our abnormal world. This is one reason why the inclusion language for disability is inherently flawed and worldly. We don’t include them, they exist in their God-given place in this God-ordained world which we share in. We dont let them live, we live with them. We don’t applaud them for being super-achievers for just living and doing life or performing in their areas of giftedness, we work shoulder-to-shoulder with them.
The table is one place wherein Jesus leveled the world. There he sat and broke bread with tax collectors and sinners, with the once-lame and leprous, the rich and the poor. When you invite the disabled into your home, your table and your church, you are leveling the playing field and learning to live in God’s world as equals. Only then are we ready to hang up the sign that reads, “Welcome to the normal”.