My Identity as a Christian with Cerebral Palsy-Part 1

Hey everyone! Welcome back to The Disability Download! I’m going to be switching gears a little bit for this month’s blog post, and sharing my personal journey of faith, and my relationship with God in relation to my cerebral palsy. 

Growing up, I was raised in a Christian home. I always knew who Jesus was, but I didn’t start developing a relationship with Him until I was a junior in college. Prior to college, I struggled with why God gave me my CP, but I didn’t know Him well enough to be able to get true answers. Particularly in high school, I struggled with this internally. I attended a large two-story high school, where my graduating class alone had about 750 students. I have distinct memories of my freshman year, where kids would tease me in the stairwells for going too slow, and times when I would cling to the hand rail, feeling like I was going to get trampled. I blamed my CP for the reason I was treated this way, despite none of those kids knowing about my CP. This came out as an anger towards God. I was frustrated with Him for giving me a body that wasn’t ‘normal’ like my peers. This was also the first time my CP was super obvious to me.

Because I lacked that relationship with God, and didn’t know how to talk to Him about it,  I stuffed those feelings deep inside me, refusing to acknowledge them. It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I started forming a relationship with Jesus. After a friend invited me to church and I met my best friend, who taught me how to read the Bible, I dove straight into reading God’s Word as much as possible. I fell deeply in love with Him, had a hunger for getting more and more involved in the church, and a desire to figure out what His plan was for my life. I was so in awe of what God was capable of, that I didn’t even consider my life with CP as a point of contention. Those feelings that I had stuffed deep within me 7 years earlier were still there, and yet, I refused to acknowledge them. I didn’t let myself talk to God about my relationship with my cerebral palsy.  I was afraid that if I acknowledged the frustration, anger, and confusion I felt, that the relationship I was cultivating with Jesus would be damaged, or inauthentic. I didn’t trust that God could fully handle all of my emotions about how He created me. 

 A few months later, I started working out regularly (which is a lot of what you’ll find on my instagram page). I had a stronger relationship with Jesus at this point, but I adopted an overcomer mindset. I would do intense workout several times a week. Often, I would listen to worship music while I worked out, but my mindset was ‘I am doing this to prove that I can do it, even with the disabled body God gave me’ instead of embracing the body God has given me, cerebral palsy and all, and moving my body just because it’s good for me, and something that I enjoy doing. My relationship with God and my cerebral palsy had never come from a place of true acceptance, from a place of knowing that God made me (and you) exactly that way that He intended, including a life with cerebral palsy.

From a cultural perspective, especially from people who may not understand disability, the overcomer mindset is one that can be seen a lot. An outsider may ask to pray for healing, not realizing that CP is a lifelong disability. I’ve been asked before ‘if a cure for CP came along, would you want it?’ and the answer will always be ‘no!’ Despite seeing my cerebral palsy as part of my identity my entire life, I didn’t always embrace it. In fact, I’ve had times when I felt very angry at the body God gave me. I never truly accepted the fact that I have cerebral palsy. I didn’t see myself as being made in His image, even after I started getting to know Him (Genesis 1:27 ESV). I never admitted it to anyone, but I felt broken, crippled, and incomplete, just because my body doesn’t always communicate with my brain like it does for nondisabled people. I viewed my body, and all of the quirks that come with CP, from my gait to my lack of fine motor, as something to spite. The feelings that first appeared from a place of anger at 14, and lived inside me, stuffed deep inside me for no one else to see, was how I talked to God about my body and my disability for 24 years…that is, until a recent weekend away that changed my life…

Stay tuned for part two, coming later this week!