Reflecting the Body of Christ through Differing Abilities
Written by Melody Franco
While a student at Duke Divinity School I received an internship placement at a local nonprofit, Reality Ministries. I searched the organization online and read in bold letters across the homepage, “where people of all abilities share life together,” and immediately thought, “Oh no, there must be some mistake… I am not qualified for this.” I grew up having no family members or close friends with an intellectual or developmental disability (IDD) and at the time would have struggled to name five people I knew with an IDD, and zero friends.
How about you? What do you think of when you hear “disability”?
Perhaps you identify closely with the disability community - you are part of it.
Perhaps you have a child with an IDD or grew up with a sibling, family member, or neighbor with a disability - you have a name and a face.
Perhaps a particular person does not come to mind, but a vague category for a group of people - you have stereotypes.
If you don’t have people in your social sphere with differing abilities, it’s not because the disability community is nonexistent in the Triangle. According to the CDC, more than one in four adults in the United States have some sort of disability. However, the disability community remains at the periphery of society with less access to transportation, independent living, meaningful jobs, higher education, and social involvement. Yet, many of us have not given much thought to the absence of the disability community from our lives. I certainly hadn’t until joining Reality Ministries three years ago.
I now work at Reality full-time as the community leader to a group of sixty adults with and without IDDs. Multiple times a week we sing, play, eat, and study Scripture together. And there are four other community groups doing this same thing - two hundred fifty participants with IDDs, each with unique interests, quirks, temperaments, longings, and fears, just like you and me.
This past spring, the Reality staff reflected on 1 Corinthians 12 in which the human body is used as a metaphor for the body of Christ. Verses 21-22 say, “The eye can never say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you.’ The head can’t say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you.’ In fact, some parts of the body that seem weakest and least important are actually the most necessary.”
Reality Ministries does not exist to serve adults with disabilities. It exists to reflect the kingdom of God, where all people are valued as integral. We believe that we need and belong to each other. We can never look someone in the eye and say, “I don’t need you.”
My time at Reality has challenged me to believe with greater conviction that I need the person I have yet to know. And perhaps, once I get to know them, I won’t be able to imagine life without them.
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I welcome you to reach out if you’d like to talk more about your own relationship with disability and/or the work of Reality Ministries. Email me at melody@realityministries.org.
