Between Sundays
“They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” ~ Job 2:13
July is Disability Pride Month, a time to celebrate the gifts, the leadership, the wisdom, and the sacred worth of people with disabilities, and also to recommit ourselves to building communities where every single person can fully belong. It feels like the right moment to tell you something about me that most of you do not know.
I live with a condition called POTS. It stands for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, which is a mouthful, and it is what they call an invisible condition. You would never know to look at me. There is still very little research around it, though thankfully that is slowly changing.
I was diagnosed in 2011, and I can tell you the exact moment it announced itself. I was driving my family across the bridge at Harpers Ferry, my kids in the car with me, when I nearly passed out at the wheel. It was one of the most frightening moments of my life. As it turned out, I was badly dehydrated, which for someone with POTS is a recipe for exactly that. After a very fun afternoon at Johns Hopkins strapped to a table that slowly tilts you upright to see if you’ll faint, and yes, that is as delightful as it sounds, I went home with a diagnosis and a treatment plan. More salt. Lots of water. A Gatorade now and then for the electrolytes. Simple stuff, and honestly, for awhile it helped.
But in the years since, research has come a long way, and we now understand that POTS rarely travels alone. Along with the racing heart and the lightheadedness, many of us live with bone-deep fatigue, brain fog, migraines, stomach trouble, trouble tolerating heat, and a body that pools blood in the legs and protests when we push it too hard. There is no cure. It is something you manage, quietly, every single day. And as I have gotten older, the symptoms have grown, so I have learned to manage it more carefully than I once did. Still, no one would ever know.
And that word, quietly, is really the heart of what I want to say this month.
You would never know any of this to look at me on a Sunday morning. And that is true of so many people sitting in our pews. The person who looks perfectly fine may be carrying something you cannot see. A chronic illness. Chronic pain. A diagnosis that has no outward sign at all. We are surrounded, every week, by people whose lives hold both real challenges and real gifts, and we would do well to honor both.
Which brings me to a harder truth, one I have had to sit with as both a pastor and a parent. Years ago, when my son was first diagnosed with autism, a well-meaning member of a church I served told me she would pray that he be healed. I know that came from a place of love. But it landed somewhere tender, because underneath the word “healed” there is sometimes a quiet and unintended message, that the person is broken. A problem to be solved. Something to be fixed.
So let me say it plainly, with all the love I have. We Christians, myself included, have an ableism problem. If that word is new to you, ableism is simply the assumption that there is one “normal” way for a body or a mind to work, and that anything else is less than, something to be fixed, accommodated as an afterthought, or worked around. It usually is not meant to be mean. Most of the time it is not even conscious. Ableism lives in the small assumptions we never stop to question, in the language we use out of habit, in the spaces we build as though everyone moves through the world exactly the way we do.
It is why, in worship, we try to be careful with our words. You may have noticed that instead of inviting you to “stand as you are able,” we now say, “stand in body or in spirit.” It is a small change, and it matters. The old phrasing quietly draws a line between the able and the unable and asks some people to measure themselves against it every single time we rise. The new phrasing simply makes room. It says there is more than one faithful way to worship God, and every one of them is welcome here. That is what it looks like to root ableism out, one word, one assumption, one open door at a time.
My son was never something to be cured. He is exactly who God made him to be, fearfully and wonderfully. And the same is true of the person with the cane, the wheelchair, the hearing aids, or the diagnosis you will never see. They are not problems for the church to fix. They are the beloved of God, whole and holy, image-bearers every one, with gifts and wisdom this community needs.
This is where Job’s friends have so much to teach us, and it is not the lesson we usually take. We remember them as the ones who got it wrong, and they did, eventually. But look at what they did first. When they came to Job in his suffering, they sat down on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights and said nothing at all, because they could see how deep his pain went. That was ministry at its finest. It was only later, when they opened their mouths to explain his suffering, to reason it out, to assign it a cause, that they failed him. Their silence was holy. Their advice was not.
So here is my invitation to all of us this month. Be kind. Always. Do not assume you know what someone is carrying. Do not rush to fix, or explain, or pray away what may not need curing at all. Just sit. Just listen. Just love. That is almost always the thing that is actually needed.
And let’s take it a step further than kindness. Accessibility is about so much more than ramps and accommodations. It is an expression of radical hospitality. It is the holy work of removing barriers, honoring every person’s dignity, and recognizing that the Body of Christ is incomplete when anyone is left out. Paul tells us there are no spare parts and no lesser members, that the very parts we are tempted to overlook turn out to be the indispensable ones. So when we make room, when we tear down a barrier, when we widen the circle, we are not doing anyone a favor. We are making the body whole.
Every one of us belongs here, seen or unseen, exactly as we are.
May we be a people who sit down in the dirt beside one another, and stay.
Until Sunday, and all the days between,
Dr. Hutton