Paul and the Paralympics
SERIES ST PAUL AND THE OLYMPICS.
8. PAUL AND THE PARALYMPICS.
Scripture: 1 CORINTHIANS 15: 30-34.
REV THE HON. DR. GORDON MOYES, A.C., M.L.C.,
B.A., LL.D., Litt.D., D.D.,
F.R.G.S., F.A.I.M., F.A.I.C.D., M.A.C.E.
Every four years, after the Olympics, the Paralympics are held. At these world games are some of the most inspirational moments of international sport. I have interviewed on radio and television many of the Paralympians. Every story is one of achievement. I remember a non-sporting event with such an amazing person a few years ago in Wesley Theatre in Sydney, in an evening service.
I had arranged for a magnificent concert pianist to play some great pieces of classical music. Japan and Korea had packed concert halls whenever 15-year-old Hee-Ah Lee gave a three-hour classical concert. Regarded as a brilliant pianist, she was in Australia for a series of concerts.
She was born without legs and has two fingers only on each hand! Her playing of the most complicated concert works is applauded everywhere. After giving a two-hour concert broadcast on the ABC, Hee-Ah Lee came to Wesley Theatre and played in our service, which featured the theme “Ability Not Disability”. She was an absolutely beautiful example of the theme. The applause was deafening from hundreds of people who could not imagine a 15-year-old girl without legs, and with six fingers missing, playing some of the most complicated works by our greatest composers in history!
1. THE DISABLED.
Australians suffer some disability. Disability mostly involves impairment to sight or hearing. More serious physical, mental or emotional disability restricts the lives of others. Yet what is important is not your disability, but your ability. Yet most people see only the disability, not the person’s ability.
Many people look at Tim Matthews and see that he has only one leg. But this one legged Australian sprinter, Tim Mathews, runs the 100 metres in 10.87 seconds. Had he competed in the Olympic Women’s 100 metres final in that time, he would have beaten every female sprinter in the world and won a gold medal! It is that kind of performance and ability that makes the Paralympics!
The ancient world had no time for the disabled. They were left to beg or die. The Romans frequently used them as objects of amusement to be torn to pieces by wild dogs in the amphitheatre or Colosseum. In some countries today they would be abandoned.
Sixty years ago, Adolf Hitler used the disabled in medical experiments inflicting gross and continuous pain. Disabled children had their legs broken again and again to measure the time taken for bones to heal. It takes something like the Paralympics to turn our focus from a person’s disability to their ability.
Wesley Mission in Sydney is a major provider of services to the disabled. Much of my twenty-seven years of leadership was spent in developing programs, raising money for staff and for the support of hundreds of disabled people. Our aim was to ensure people with disabilities are valued, accepted and enabled to grow.
Our vision was to be a leading provider of services empowering people with disabilities to reach full potential in the community. The last year of my leadership saw $10 million raised and spent in supporting the disabled. All Wesley Disability Support Services conform to the Commonwealth’s Disability Service Standards and are accredited quality services through ISO 9001:2000.
“Breakaway” Children’s Respite Service supports families and carers of children with a disability by providing regular away-from-home, quality care. Respite is one of a range of professional services available to maximise opportunities for each child. Every year “Breakaway” provided respite to 52 disabled children, aged between 5 and 18. Faced with an immense demand for school holiday activities, “Breakaway” operates a recreation program during school vacations for more than 50 children who are profoundly disabled.
Wesley Life Skills is for those disabled who want work as a goal. We identify areas where people with disabilities have the same work opportunities and knowledge as their peers. The total number of clients increased to over one hundred disabled people in eight services throughout Sydney.
Wesley Disability Accommodation Service provides 24-hour accommodation support for 32 people with high support needs. These people reside in “group homes”. I opened three new services at a cost of $1.5 million not long before I completed my ministry there.
Wesley Residential Service helps 31 people with disabilities determine their future, to live independently and be included in their community. Wesley provides training and expansion of their social networks. This particular work always gave me great encouragement as I met our people and saw what they were accomplishing.
David Morgan Enterprises provides supported employment for over 100 people with disabilities, many of them profoundly disabled being blind, hearing impaired and intellectually disabled. Our commitment is to provide effective, commercially viable employment opportunities for people with disabilities.
Our activities comply with all commercial, trading, OH&S regulations and the 11 Disability Service Standards laid down by the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA). Our business activities included contract packaging, garden services, leisure furniture manufacturing, laundry services and employee placement. We were the people that packed over three million items for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Sydney Olympic Games. Every person who attended found on their seat a special package from Wesley’s disabled employees – all quarter of a million people. Our businesses are buoyant and we paid every disabled employee a special significant cash bonus for their Olympic achievements.
Wesley’s Goodwill Laundry Service increased sales 48% last year and our Complete Garden Services increased by 59%. Wesley Industries, which supports employment of the disabled, employs more than 30 people.
The Lottie Stewart Hospital provides total services to scores of profoundly disabled people, many of whom are paraplegic or quadriplegic, and all of whom are wheelchair bound.
For more than twenty-seven years I stressed that Wesley Mission would focus on the abilities, achievements and talents of people with disabilities rather than on their disabilities. We think ability not disability.
2. ST. PAUL AND DISABILITIES.
“With Paul at the Games” we have examined his use of phrases with the sporting connotations that were witnessed by the people of Corinth at the Isthmian Games, which were held there when Paul was living in Corinth, during 50-51 AD.
But Paul also understood living with disability. He was an amazingly tough and courageous man. Many would not consider Paul suffered from a severe disability. For, unlike many of us, he rarely mentioned his problems! So rare are the instances, we have to piece them together to reconstruct what his disability was! Follow these verses: When his scribe had finished writing on the parchment his dictated letter, Paul would take up the pen and write a conclusion to personally authenticate the letter. At the end of a letter to the churches in Galatia, (central Turkey) he exclaims with some surprise in Gal 6:11, “See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!” Paul may have written such large letters due to poor eye sight.
This could be his disability he refers to as simply his “thorn in the flesh” 2 Corinthians 12:7-9 “To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”
While this does not point to his eyesight, note another passage that leads me to thinking it was poor eyesight which caused him such heartache. What a disability for a traveling preacher, writer and church planter, to have limited sight.
Galatians 4: 13-15, “As you know, it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you. Even though my illness was a trial to you, you did not treat me with contempt or scorn. Instead, you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus himself. What has happened to all your joy? I can testify that, if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me.” What wonderful concern they had: “if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me.”
But Paul persisted. He did not let his disability restrict his ministry. He used his ability to proclaim and write the Gospel and to establish new churches throughout the known world. In doing so, he became a role model to Christians with disabilities ever since.
3. RESPONDING TO DISABILITY.
The psychiatrist Dr Victor Frankl realised that humans had the unique and invaluable ability to choose how things would affect them, no matter what happened to them. Frankl made this discovery while a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp where he was starved and tortured. During this time his parents, brothers and sisters and his wife were all murdered.
He discovered that even in the worst of situations, some people kept control of their lives while others succumbed to the forces controlling them. The knowledge that he had both the freedom and power to choose his own response, no matter what atrocities his captors inflicted upon him, was a break-through which helped him and many others to survive the horrors of those times. Here he developed the concept of proactivity. This was in contrast to deterministic behaviour. This can make all the difference to any person with a disability.
Most paralympians have made the choice to be proactive about their disability – that is why they are today champions! Most human psychology this century has been deterministic. That is, our actions, characters and behaviour are seen as being determined by external factors: whether genetic (‘I can’t help it, that’s the way I was born’), environmental (‘my wife pushed me too far’) or psychological (‘it’s because my father was never there for me as a child’).
There is little choice involved. Is there nothing we can do about our situation? Frankl says there is – you can take responsibility for yourself and choose your response.
Determinism has more validity for laboratory rats than people. Humans alone have the ability to choose a response to any given stimulus. We can be aware of our own responses, analyse them and exercise our will over them. We also have imagination, conscience, and religious faith that can give us power over our circumstances.
These can take us outside and above our present circumstances and allow us to respond differently. People take responsibility for their lives and what happens to them. This responsibility means responding as we choose. Truly proactive people embrace this responsibility. They never blame their situation, environment, conditioning or other people for their behaviour. They choose it themselves, based on their values from their faith not their feelings.
People who are reactive, on the other hand, are so because they elect to be. If we are governed by colleagues and conditions it means we have, either consciously or by default, empowered those things to control our lives.
A reactive person dwells on concerns outside their power to control. They increasingly complain, blame and feel victimised. They are negative people. Many of them come into our care to be treated because they cannot get on top of their situation. They believe everything and everybody is against them.
4. HOW FAITH HELPS US RESPOND TO DISABILITY.
On the other hand, Christians must positively take control of themselves and their circumstances by God’s power. God promises to empower you. The trouble is that many of us do not live our Christian faith. We allow things to determine our destiny.
We must learn to be proactive and positive, trusting in God’s goodness, guidance and power. We must take control of our own lives. There are some things we just accept: we have some disability for example. There are some things we will not accept: we will not allow this disability to handicap us and stop our achieving. We pray that God will help us discern the one from the other.
Hence Wesley Mission’s children’s centres, counselling services, Disabilities Services, and in all other areas where people face their disabilities, are conducted on a Christian basis. For it is by faith in Christ that we live.
When we choose him, we choose the way we shall live. Hear the Good News! You do not have to live in a cycle of despair. You do not have to bear the burden of your parents’ sin. You do not have to be determined by your environment, genes or up-bringing. You can be you. A new you! A reborn you! Jesus Christ gives you the power to overcome. You can be born a child of God. The cycle can be broken. Instead, you can be born again – a new you! Why not accept it?
REV THE HON. DR GORDON MOYES AC MLC
