Why does god make retarded people

Here is heartache. Only 3 per cent of the mentally handicapped are institutionalized; the remaining 97 per cent are at home, many of them without adequate schooling, recreation, friendship, and church life. For those who do not know that Christ controls all that happens in their lives, there is usually a harrowing time of guilt and self-examination.

As a Christian I went through this for a mercifully short period, when it had to be all or nothing. Yet even with the most scripturally grounded believers, the human element of what may be called a built-in psychological mechanism is not wholly canceled. When a mentally handicapped child is born, this mechanism may lead to bewildered questioning. How can I live with this? What shall I do? Some unfortunate parents never progress beyond this stage. Some parents pass through these stages rapidly, others slowly, and some never through all three.

Nor does being a Christian exempt parents from these experiences. But, as my husband and I know, many Christians are able through the grace of God to reach the third stage more rapidly than others. For ourselves, we learned that when parents are told their child is mentally retarded, they suddenly realize that if all they believe and have professed is really true, then it must be sufficient now in this moment of soul-searing truth. Christians who have faced with God this hardest of problems understand why their faith is powerful, why it is built on agony and sacrifice instead of upon mere platitudes and kind sayings.

If my faith offered only some practical guides to everyday living, I would not be able to write this.

But for Christians who have such inescapable problems, it means everything to know that we have a hereafter to count upon for us and our children. We have a God who is all-powerful, all-loving, and in control.

Perhaps the most comforting fact of all is that Christ loves the unlovely. Many retarded are unlovely; their features are ugly. Some have crossed eyes, some have heads malformed from birth injuries; others are palsied, and still others are so handicapped that they are living vegetables. All of us Christians included have a great deal to learn about the problem of retardation.

Every retardate has parents and often brothers and sisters who desperately need Christian friendship, Christian love, a church home, and genuine acceptance. Why is it true, not only concerning retardation, but also in respect to alcoholism, mental illness, and the underprivileged poor?

Why are some evangelicals letting their liberal friends do most of the works of compassion, while they argue about immersion versus sprinkling and whether Christ will come before or after the tribulation—and all the time souls in the agony of despair over a mentally retarded child, an alcoholic or mentally sick relative, are perishing all around them?

While Christians who have knowledge and understanding of the power that alone can save souls and ease burdens quibble over how separated they are, there is intense spiritual suffering going on in the very blocks where they live. And somehow they are strangely uninterested in helping. Where have we and I include myself been? It is time to come down out of the clouds of theological controversy and spiritual pride and to take our share of responsibility for the unfortunates of society.

Our great-grandparents did it for the slaves. What then should Christians do? Let me offer some suggestions based upon experience. First, they must realize that retarded children and adults need to feel wanted and that church life is important for them.

Most retardates understand something about death; many can understand, to a limited degree, the concept of an all-powerful Being; many understand wrongdoing; virtually all can understand love—the quality they need more than any other. Thus many mentally retarded persons are able to understand something of the central truth that Jesus is God and that he loved them enough to die for them.

And after all, what else is there? This is the magnitude of the Gospel and its magnificent simplicity. I believe that my little child understands this great truth. Whether she is or ever will be at the age of discernment I may never know; but she loves Jesus, and she knows that he loves her.

And if she could not grasp even this, I would still know that he loves her. A teacher of a primary-level church class for normal children told me recently how a rather severely retarded child entered class the day the Gospel story was told. Instead of being a behavior problem as the teacher feared, the child sat very still. At the end of the lesson, the teacher gave a simple invitation to accept Christ.

Can I? Every retardate has a family, and these are often in greater need than the retardate. What about the parents and others in the family? This is what pastors and congregations must ask when they decide to do something for the retarded. What of the teen-aged brother of the little mongoloid in the special class? Is this adolescent made welcome and shown that his church understands?

Does the congregation realize that mongolism is not hereditary and is not the result of some hidden sin of the parents? Churches must do more than begin classes for the retarded; concern must also be shown for their families. Evangelicals might well follow the example set by some of more liberal theology and start group therapy classes for parents, never forgetting that the greatest therapy comes through personal knowledge of Christ as Saviour and Lord.

Only those who have a defective child will ever know the terrible need for acceptance, the deep desire to be treated like other families. The cruel stigma against the retarded has been tolerated far too long. Human beings seem to accept any handicap so long as it does not limit the one thing we need above all else—the mind.

Today in an inarticulate but eloquent plea the retarded are calling for help. It is to the lasting credit of our late President Kennedy, whose oldest sister is mentally retarded, that he heard that plea and led the movement resulting in the first legislation in our national history designed to help the retarded.

Emotional response is not in itself sufficient. Response must be informed. This means that Christians must lake the trouble to learn the difference between retardation and mental illness. They should know what facilities their communities offer for therapy and schooling for all retarded. They should be aware of the need for greater educational opportunities, more job openings, additional legislation in the field of retardation, and institutional reforms.

Above all, they should know that retardation can happen to any family, that it is no respecter of education, social position, or economic status. With such knowledge they will have something concrete to recommend when a young couple comes to church in the crisis of having just learned that their child is mentally handicapped. Parents of retarded children can become victims of the most callous medical quackeries—money-draining schemes that claim miracle cures. The parents must be helped to realize that there is no cure.

There can in some cases be great progress for the retarded child. Nevertheless, retardation is a condition, not an illness to be cured. Apparently our Lord meant for the retarded always to be with us, needing our help and understanding. All children take their cues from their parents and the adults around them. Normal and gifted children must learn compassion for their unfortunate brothers or sisters.

Benedict believed in order to grow as a human being, you need other people. To be a person of Great Spirit cannot be done alone. Adapting the practice of St. Benedict asks that we see the divine in every single adult and child that we encounter.

In our faith communities it is about accepting those who are different. Acceptance is not about judging or condoning behavior. It is about embracing. Welcoming all children into our faith communities is an act of radical hospitality. Hold the deficit side facing out against your chest.

Close your eyes and take a few minutes and imagine that everyone you meet only sees this side of you. They only talk to you from this perspective. What would the conversations be like, how would you feel. When you want to talk about something you feel good about, the person only responds to what they see on the front of your piece of paper. They only see the deficits and they probably will try to fix you. How do you think you would react and treat them? Now release these thoughts to the Universe.

Now hold the gift side facing out next to your chest. Take a few minutes to imagine that the people you meet can only see this side of you. They see all your strengths and gifts and think you can take care of yourself. They do not try to fix anything. Children who have been labeled with a disability or disorder or those who are perceived as weird or difficult walk around as if they have a piece of paper plastered to their chest labeling all their deficits and in this society we have a tendency to want to fix them.

We hear a child is autistic and we immediately assume he will be difficult to handle, we hear a child is mentally retarded and we assume she has limited abilities, we hear a child is struggling in school and we assume he is not very smart or are just lazy, we hear a child has ADD and we assume she will be a trouble maker.

And then we expect all of these children to behave according to our assumptions. It often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And we wonder why some of our labeled children are so angry and difficult. Then the fight becomes us vs. Because we choose to believe that each person is different from the next person, then no one difference should be more normal than the next. Most people in our culture, social service professionals, doctors, teachers, school professionals, and even ourselves operate within the disability paradigm in which we decide certain types of differences have to be fixed.

I am one of the first to be thankful for the law. And I also realize that sometimes a diagnosis can bring relief to years of confusion and suffering because now there seems to be a reason for the behavior and a perhaps a method of treatment. But it is a double-edged sword. It also, as demonstrated by our activity, can lead to assumptions of expected behavior based on the label. So, have we gone too far? Are we narrowly defining what is normal so more and more children are forced into the special needs label?

When we talk about hospitality in our churches, we are addressing issues of inclusion and exclusion or as Judith defines it—disability versus giftedness paradigms. As demonstrated by our labeling activity, our entire culture excludes people based on labels, differences, their color, their sex, their race, their religion, their age, how they are dressed, how much money they make, where they went or go to school, the list goes on and on.

It is not a mere social grace; it is a spiritual and ethical issue. It is an issue involving what it means to be human. But calling hospitality a moral issue does not tell us the whole truth about hospitality either. A moral issue can become bogged down in legalisms, and hospitality is no legalistic ethical issue. It is instead a spiritual practice, a way of becoming more human, a way of understanding yourself.

Hospitality is both the answer to modern alienation and injustice and a path to a deeper spirituality. It is something we do to gain new understanding of ourselves and leads to growth, change, and a more loving way to be in the world.

We stretch ourselves in spiritual practice. Meditation, prayer, walking mindfully, hiking, and feeding the homeless can all be forms of spiritual practice. Spirituality is about relationship. Accepting people different from ourselves means acknowledging our fears. We live in a fear-based culture in which we fear those who are different from us. Fear of others chokes out love. Hospitality is risky and is courageous and calls us to confront and sit with our fear of those who are different. Only then can we feel a transforming love.

The act of hospitality heals us as individuals and as faith communities. We all know that merely being nice to people does not always change us. We sometimes go through the motions without being affected. The hospitality espoused by St.

Benedict requires us to make connections with those we feel are different and then we are personally transformed. Connecting with a child who is struggling can be simple; it does not necessarily mean making every child your best friend. Children are rarely listened to, so often their desires and wants are ignored by the adult who believes they know best. We make assumptions based on the labels and our past experiences. So often when we parent, befriend or minister to children we have to confront our own fears.