Disability and the Soul
Kendra Cordero
In observance of Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month, The Rees-Jones Foundation is honored to highlight the experience of children and caregivers who live with developmental disabilities everyday through a piece written originally for Irving Bible Church. The author, Kendra Cordero, is a mother to a beautiful son with autism. With permission from Irving Bible Church and Ms. Cordero, we are grateful to showcase their experience and continue shining a light on why investment in the work of disability inclusion is necessary and valuable. For more information on our partners in this space, check out our What We Fund page.
What I am learning lately from my Autistic son…
My son struggles with self injurious behavior (ASD level 3). Y’all, it’s pretty intense at times. He leaves marks on his body frequently. One day recently when he was punching his jaw I said, “Treat yourself with gentle hands.” He stopped. He looked at me with a moment of complete clarity and said, “Myself is in my body.” As if to instruct me–”Mother, my hands cannot touch myself, they can only touch my body.” He did not let me leave my words the way I stated them. He pushed me until I corrected my own statement, “Treat your body with gentle hands.” 
I got stuck there for a while. “Myself is in my body.”
All of our kids have bodies that, in some way, have made functioning in this world incredibly difficult for them. But their souls? They are inside. My son–his true self–is inside his body. He is fine. He is beautifully and wonderfully made. He is in Christ and his soul is a new creation. He has been redeemed and made new. But his body? It struggles.
2 Corinthians 5:1 says, “For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (That is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands.”
I focus on the physical to a fault. I obsess over teaching my son how to function on this earth in this body that he has been given. That task overwhelms me and consumes me sometimes. I mourn the ways that, due to his disability, his experiences fall short compared to other kids his age. As if this world is the end all be all. As if he is his body.
I’m wrong. He is right. Not to say it’s wrong of me to help him navigate the physical world or to mourn the things that are sad. But my thoughts need some adjusting. I
am often thinking about the body and the physical things that are seen without focusing on the spiritual reality. The Bible tells me that this life is a “vapor” or in common language “a blink of an eye.” We are in our imperfect bodies for a very short time but our souls will last forever. So why am I obsessing over physical stressors constantly?
You are in your body. You are a soul. You are beautifully and wonderfully made. If you are in Christ, the old is gone. He has redeemed you and made you new. No matter what is going on with your body, this is true. When you are in Christ, evil cannot touch your soul–it cannot touch you.
It seems that God moved past my son’s disabled physical body and his disabled physical brain, straight to his soul. It seems the Spirit taught him that he is in his body (I obviously didn’t teach him that). And it makes sense, right? I know the Creator loves him so much and there is no disability found in his soul.
And I wonder if God interacts with all of our kids this way. I can imagine his Spirit gathering their little souls into spiritual circle time and saying to them, “You are in my protective, loving hold. You are not broken. Because I have you, you are whole. Your body doesn’t work correctly right now but you are in this body for only a short time and you are safe. I love you.”
Lord, thank you that we are not our bodies. Thank you for protecting our souls.
1 Corinthians 1:7 says, “Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God” (The Message).