Our Ultimate Handicap
My intention in this short note is for us to learn and growcin asking the following sensitive question: What do you think about when someone says the word “handicap”? Many may react with thoughts of blindness, deafness, or some crippling condition. That was my reaction until I met a job-coach specialist for disabled people during a course I took as a member of the New Bedford Public Schools Special Needs Department back in the mid 1980’s.
As a quick backdrop, most of us are familiar with golf handicaps, horse handicapping, or providing odds to gamblers to make their bet “fair” or made even somehow. The job coach specialist offered a similar connection with his insightful work perspective. He said a handicap is not the individual, but what one does to offset or equalize the condition of that individual. For example, a blind person has lost sight. That person may be “covered in a handy way” or “handicapped” by use of a Seeing Eye dog, Braille, or walking cane. A “crippled” person cannot walk. That person is handicapped by use of a strategic parking space, a wheel chair, and/or a ramp to facilitate access into a building.
His fundamental goal during this course was for those of us who worked with special needs students to become more effective in placing disabled people into the workforce. Our personal focus of separating the essential worth of the person from his/her disabling condition was the motivation he shared that brought all of us a new hope.
If this seems revealing, logical, and understandable, then what do we regard as the ultimate handicap? The Bible says “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” and “for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”. The Bible also declares, “for whosoever shall call upon the Lord shall be saved.”
Serious physical, mental, emotional, social, and educational conditions abound and are real among us. In the midst of all our earthly challenges, however, we have a need for “”handicapping” our sinful condition because of its most significant consequences. Because you and I qualify as a whosoever, we have Jesus Christ to call upon as our free gift. By God’s grace and His declaration of our true value, we may be sinners but we are not our sin. If you haven’t already, won’t you call upon Him right now to come into your heart, forgive you of your sins, and be Lord and Savior of your life.
In faith, to receive the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ and become a child of the living God is work-free, an everlasting placement, and our “Ultimate Handicap”!
Steven J. Bouley, Fairhaven
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