By: JANA GREENE

When people ask me what was the catalyst to reconstructing my faith, my genetic conditions top the list. There is nothing like “casting demons” out of a person who was born with a disability. It really adds insult to (literal) injury. You must be spiritually lacking, if you’re not getting well! You’re “under attack.” You’re oppressed by the enemy.” If you just prayed harder, believed harder! Surrender more!

And I didn’t get physically better. At all.

So it’s obviously a problem with my faith! I’ve been told the metal in my ankle had literally turned in to bone, and that I had already “gotten my healing,” it’s just not “manifesting” yet because there is some COSMIC LESSON in it for me that I’m not quite getting, so God is giving me the business. In a LOVING way, of course, but it just feels like pain to me, so what’s up with THAT kind of love? His ways aren’t our ways, to which I say: Why did he imbed the ability to love or be loved in us? We know what feels loving, and what feels cruel. Its love that makes the (fallen, broken) world go round.

People with disabilities maybe don’t need your judgey insistence that they are sick spiritually defective people, demons inhabit them. Powers of darkness aren’t making me sick; I was born making faulty, mutated collagen that my body cannot effectively use, and a host of other 100% genetic conditions that no amount of speaking in tongues, laying on hands, and fervent prayers will fix.

And here’s the thing: That’s okay.

I’m okay with that. I am NOT okay with perpetuating this mindset to the disabled community. It’s one thing to pray for healing (I pray all the time,) it’s another to perform a sort of exorcism on a person who is just simply born in a sick body.

But I have been healed in other ways.

All the years of being told I’m healed by Jesus’ “stripes,” I truly believe I was receiving another kind of healing, just as profound. My identity as a broken person has been fixed, in that I’m not begging God 24/7 to make me whole. Maybe I’m already whole and wasn’t defective in the first place. My sense of surrender has been healed. My acceptance of my humanity – and my differently-abled body? I’m getting that shit down.

Maybe the church (and world) are being called to love disabled people where they’re at. Maybe ask what help they need, instead of making their already difficult lives become about their eternal souls. We already feel like shit. We don’t need the layers of shame, guilt, pity, and fear that comes with this kind of religion. And for God’s sake, leave demons out of it altogether, holy cow!

Love people where they’re at, just as you love and accept the able-bodied. We can do better. We must do better.