How can we create Agape Restoration Communities where Christian people really care about each other and support one another... especially people we tend to ignore – people with disabilities and the elderly? 61 Million adults in the United States live with a disability – that's 26%, or over 1 in every 4 adults. (Click on the photo from the Center for Disease Control to see all six parts of this infographic. You can also download it as a PDF.) The second part of the infographic shows us the percentages of adults with functional disability types: 13.7% - mobility, 10.8% - cognition, 6.8% - independent living, 5.9% - hearing, 4.6% - vision, and 3.7% - self-care. These often overlap, but mobility issues make up over half of all disabilities.
Why don't we know about disabilities? It's because we literally don't see most of them: people with mobility or self-care, cognition, and independent living problems can't get out easily to public places like shopping, church, restaurants, etc.: we don't see them because they're not there, they can hardly get out of their homes, so – "Out of sight, out of mind" – we assume they don't exist! Also, we ignore them: we likely have an unconscious bias against disability: it reminds us of our own mortality, so we would rather not think about it.
Then there are the "invisible disabilities": you see the person but you don't see their disability, such as heart, back, or knee problems that limit a person's ability, for example, to carry over 15 pounds or walk more than 50 or 100 feet or a block or two so you think they're lazy; or hearing loss that may make you think the person is ignoring you or is sort of stupid or doesn't understand English. (I have a bad back and shouldn't carry heavy stuff; I also have severe hearing loss – even with hearing aids I often can't understand speech, especially in a noisy environment... although I like to meet people, have a doctorate degree, and know several languages.)
How does disability impact the rest of us? If we could help many of these disabled people to be able to contribute to society, think of the impact it could have. This is an urgent issue for Christians to address: we are ignoring 26% of the people in the world! And these are the very people to whom Jesus Christ directed most of His ministry – "the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind." The Gospel teaches us "love your neighbor as yourself," but if we don't see them, we don't have to love them, right?
Wrong! The Russian verb "to hate" literally means "to not look at" or "to not see" – if we look the other way in the presence of a disabled person or ignore a beggar or a person who can't hear very well and it's hard to hold a conversation, we do not love them – we "do not look at" them – we passively hate them. It's not easy to overcome these prejudices that we've built up over a lifetime but we must try. We must change. Change is hard, but change we must. Join "The ARC" Chat/Video Forum to Build the ARC. And enroll in our free "Social Ministry of the Church" courses to see how YOU can do diakonia-ministry to the disabled!
61 Million adults in the United States live with a disability – that's 26%, or over 1 in every 4 adults. (Click on the photo from the Center for Disease Control to see all six parts of this infographic. You can also download it as a PDF.) The second part of the infographic shows us the percentages of adults with functional disability types: 13.7% - mobility, 10.8% - cognition, 6.8% - independent living, 5.9% - hearing, 4.6% - vision, and 3.7% - self-care. These often overlap, but mobility issues make up over half of all disabilities.