Thank you for this. It is nice to read how people can have incredibly different spiritual journeys and came to the same conclusion. It is a mature perspective on disability.
I think one of the things that is hardest to accept about Christianity is that it doesn't bring any earthly satisfactions. If you're seeking contentment, prosperity, enlightenment, healing, freedom from suffering - Christianity promises none of those. I mean, look at the Apostles, homeless, beaten, and eventually died horrific deaths.
2 Corinthians 11:23-28
Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one—I am talking like a madman—with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.
Our physical or ven mental afflictions are not the point of our lives on earth. Case in point - Matthew 13:58. Jesus refused to heal when it became apparent the crowd just wanted to see him perform, rather than being receptive to God's glory.
Which suggests that it is not the
healing of afflictions that is important to God, but that these healings brought
glory to God. Paul's healing would not have brought glory to God. Ego, he wasn't healed. And millennia later, his struggles with disability continue to inspire this middle-aged woman (me) and I think of him everyday when limping through life.
Your journey with Jesus has been very spiritual and insightful. In many ways, similar to mine because my life has also been dominated by disability. In other ways, the opposite because, I was a hardcore atheist. I was so hardcore that I engaged my pastor in debate for six months straight, throwing everything I had at him to disprove Christianity and his claims of the Resurrection being historical fact, only to have him kick my butt. I even went as far to write code to partially reconstruct the New Testament based on early Church fathers (pre-325 AD) quoting the New Testament alone to verify his claims that the NT is so well documented from early outside sources.
Turns out, winning debates is easy when you have all the facts on your side, as my pastor did. So, here I am 4 years later. I'm still an extreme skeptic. Just one that arrived to the conclusion that the Resurrection happened.
racheltestimony.blogspot.com
