Otherwise:

What You Might Not Know With a "Better" Body

“There’s something about God, and myself, that I would not know otherwise.”

I can’t chart how many times friends have said these words to me after they have endured a hard journey, during a difficult disease, or once they came to terms with a reality they finally surrendered to. There is something, if my friends are to be believed, which can only be known and experienced by journeying to the far side of discomfort, pain, heartache, and loss.

None of us want to go on a truly painful journey. No one. And while there are some of us who have expanded our capacity for discomfort and hardship, we have done so through previously embracing a process of pain which we disliked.

This last fall, I read Amy Kenny’s My Body Is Not a Prayer Request. Kenny rearranged my still incomplete understanding of disability. For instance, she suggest we might receive the disabled as being disabled by the will of God and not pray for the erasure of disabilities.