Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep973: Disability, Theology, and the Church: Dr. Devan Stahl

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Dr. Devan Stahl is Assistant Professor of Religion at Baylor University. She holds an MDiv from Vanderbilt Divinity School and a Ph.D. from St. Louis University. She previously was an Assistant Professor of Clinical Ethics at Michigan State University and has experience teaching bioethics and medical humanities to undergraduates, medical students and residents, nursing students, and veterinary students. She has also worked as a clinical ethicist in tertiary hospitals and has trained as a hospital chaplain. Devin’s experience with MS has led her to become a leading voice in the conversation about a Theology of Disability, which is the topic of our conversation.  https://www.baylor.edu/religion/index.php?id=962728 –––––– PROMOS Save 10% on courses with Kairos Classroom using code TITR at kairosclassroom.com! –––––– Sign up with Faithful Counseling today to save 10% off of your first month at the link:  faithfulcounseling.com/titr or use code TITR at faithfulcounseling.com –––––– Save 30% at SeminaryNow.com by using code TITR –––––– Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review. www.theologyintheraw.com

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. If you would like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw or check out the link in the show notes and you can support the show for as little as five bucks a month and get access to premium content like monthly Patreon-only Q&A podcasts, blogs, and other perks and goodies. Again, patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. My guest today is Dr. Devin Stahl, who is assistant professor of religion at Baylor University. She has an MDiv from Vanderbilt Divinity School and a PhD from St. Louis University. She has experience teaching bioethics and medical

humanities to undergraduates, medical students and residents, nursing students and veterinary students, and has also worked as a clinical ethicist in hospitals and has worked as a chaplain as well. Devin is a specialist in our topic today, theology of disability and the church. And as some of you know, this has been a topic that I've been trying to grow in my understanding of. I think it's something that the church absolutely needs to do a better job reflecting on. And so I'm at the very beginning of my journey reflecting on this important topic. And as some of you know, at next year's Exiles in Babylon conference here in Boise, Idaho, we are going to have one of the four sessions dedicated to a theology of disability and the church. So I'm really super, super excited about that. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr.

Devin Stahl. All right. Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I'm here with Dr. Devin Stahl. Devin, if I may call you Devin. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. I've been looking forward to this for months. I know we booked it a while back. And this area of study, theology of disability has been something I know very, very little about. And yet it's among my top interests. And I would say, as I look at the church, one of the biggest maybe blind spots that the church hasn't really thought deeply through. So we'd love to hear your story and then we'll get into theology of disability and see where that leads us. Sure. So I think my sort of journey into this subject area came when I was in divinity school.

So I was a religion major, thought I wanted to maybe be a minister. And I ended up at Vanderbilt Divinity School. And my first year there, I had this experience of like losing sensation in my feet and my legs. And it was just a kind of a, you know, it could have been something I ignored. Because when you're, I was like 23 years old. And when you're 23 years old, you're like, meh, my body's great. It'll go away. It's fine. Um, but I thankfully went to a doctor and was like, Hey, this seems kind of weird. I feel really numb in my feet and legs. And what ended up being many months journey turned out that I had multiple sclerosis, which is a neurodegenerative autoimmune disorder. And that was just this huge moment in my life where I had thought I was invincible, or maybe I had never really thought about it before, about my body and about it being able to function the

ways I wanted it to, because I always had. So it came to this moment where I was like, well, my body is not exactly what I thought it was. It's going to forever do these things that are unexpected. MS is relapsing, remitting, or the kind I have is so I can relapse and not see straight or not think straight or not be able to use my limbs. So it creates this kind of moments of unexpected sort of chaos with your body, or that's how it felt at first. And so I had to sort of think about what that meant for my future and my life. And it kind of upended everything I thought I knew about myself. And then it caused me to think, you know, what does this mean about my relationship with God and who God is for me in this process?

And there just wasn't a lot of resources out there for me. There wasn't a particular professor who had this specialty about thinking about disability. So I had to do a lot of my own investigating of what does this mean? And my church was very supportive, but they also didn't really know how to advise me through that process of learning to sort of think about myself as disabled or with a chronic illness. What are some of the, so the, it can just kind of come in waves and all of a sudden like you could wake up one morning and your legs don't function right or something. Is that,

and how often does that happen? Is it like every week, every month, once a year or just all of the map? Yeah, I mean, I've been, for me, it hasn't been too disruptive. I mean, I definitely have these episodes where fatigue and brain fuzziness that come on. The more serious stuff, yeah, it's just, you just never know. There's no real warning for it. I take some warning for it. Um, I take some medications for it, but yeah, so it's very spontaneous. How many people experience some form of MS would you say?

Oh gosh, I should know the statistics. It's not super uncommon. I'll say that it's, um, especially for people like me. So the, the most people who get MS get it kind of in their early twenties or they discovered in their early twenties, most of them are white women. That's not to say everybody, but I kind of fit the profile and I didn't know that at the time, but it is, it seems to be something that happens a lot to more so to women and more so to women in like Northern climates. So, so a lot of white women, American women, European women. And of course, we don't know like what causes it or of course how to fix it. So it's a lot of it's a mystery.

And I would imagine it exists kind of on a spectrum of mild to severe. Like if someone has severe MS, that can be pretty debilitating. That's right. severe MS, that can be pretty debilitating. Well, that's right. So there's the kind I have, relapsing-remitting, where you have these relapses and then they kind of fade away. And then there's a primary progressive where every time you have an experience, it kind of compounds on itself. So it never really goes away. So those are two different kinds. And then I think it's just more of an aging process because either kind you have, the more symptoms you have, the worse they sort of get in the future.

So it tends to be that those who experience the more severe side of it, it's because they've just lived longer with it. So that's something else I have to think about for my future. What does a future look like where I'm even more disabled than I am now? Right, right. So what you mentioned in passing, like, you know, you had to think about what does this mean with my faith and everything? Like, was there a faith, I don't want to say crisis, but I mean, maybe. But yeah, how did you process this in relation to your faith? Yeah, I mean, I thankfully never went through an experience that a lot of my friends who have disabilities have where it was like, is God punishing me for something? I didn't quite think that, although a lot of people do. And I've done some chaplaincy in this connected to? Like, is this some sort of like, cosmic sin? Is it like, is it original sin that allows this sort of thing to happen? Or is God trying to teach me a lesson about something? Or is this somehow building up my character or virtues?

Or, but really, it was just why, why me? Like, why would this happen to me? You know, what, how do I think about that theologically? And thankfully I was in a space, right? I always say this is the best space that could have happened in your, you know, a young seminarian thinking about God anyway. So it was a really fruitful space for that to have happened in so that I could dig more deeply into what I thought this was all about. What was your conclusion then? Is this a lesson for you that God ordained? Is it just part of the natural world, part of the fallen world? What's God's involvement in this? Did you come to a satisfying answer to that theologically?

I think I still am in that. I don't think I'll ever really come to an answer to this, but I do think I've excluded some things. So I don't think that my disability is tied to any sort of sin, whether that's like a personal sin or even a cosmic sin. I don't think of my disability as a bad thing that happened to me anymore. bad thing that happened to me anymore. I think, and a lot of people do, and I don't want to discount that experience because it's, this illness is very difficult for a lot of people as are all sorts of illnesses and disabilities. For me, it didn't feel connected to sin in that way. It felt like a thing that happens because we are vulnerable people. We are people who are not invincible and our bodies are limited. And this is the way that my particular body is limited. And where I see God fitting into that is both that

we are created as these kind of limited, vulnerable beings, but also that God can make wonderful things happen in experiences that we might not think are wonderful at the time. So I don't think this was like God's grand plan for my life to make me have MS and then learn from it. But rather, this is a thing that happened because of the kind of being that I am. And God can create wonderful, meaningful experiences in the midst of difficult experiences. And then so you're a seminarian at this time, and then you went on to do a PhD. Was that in like some sort of disability theology? And then so you're a seminarian at this time, and then you went on to do a PhD. Was that in like some sort of disability theology? And if so, what area did you focus on?

Yeah, so first I did some hospital chaplaincy. Because I thought because I actually had some really kind of negative experiences with physicians when I was being diagnosed. And I thought, I could have really used somebody like a spiritual person in my life to mentor me through that process. And I could be that for somebody else. But when I was doing that, I met a ethicist at the hospital and her whole job was to like, get called by the clinicians or families to say, this is really ethically difficult. What should we do? And I actually thought that's such a cool job. I ended up getting a PhD in healthcare ethics. So, um, so my PhD at St. Louis university, I got to do the theology work and the disability work, but I also got to work

in hospitals as an ethicist. And so a lot of my work still is working in hospitals alongside physicians and nurses and families thinking about difficult ethics issues that come up. And then I get to go to the classroom and teach about them. And then I get to sort of work through the disability stuff in both of those spaces. What are some of the ethical questions, the top ones? I mean, I just automatically go to like euthanasia or something, but I'm sure there's, I'm sure that's among the top, but I mean, are there, what are there some other questions that ethicists and hospitals are navigating? Well, we don't get a lot of euthanasia cases only because it's illegal, right? So if anyone's asking about it, my advice is always like, don't do it because it's illegal.

But a lot of the cases, there are a lot of end of life cases. A lot of the cases, there are a lot of end of life cases. So often if it's coming from a clinical team, it's the patient is dying and we don't think that there's much more we can do for them, but they want everything. They want more medicine. They want more technology. And we just think it's wrong to put that on this patient who isn't going to benefit from it. Are we allowed to say no? So a lot of the cases are physicians saying, we just don't want to do this anymore. We feel like we're torturing a patient, but their family keeps insisting because they don't understand the reality of the situation. So a lot of cases are like that. Sometimes it's the reverse. It's the patient kind of saying, I don't, I don't want this anymore. Just let me go home to die. And the clinical team going, no, we can't, that feels wrong to us. So those are kind of the, I would say, the main cases we get. But every case is different. And every case has its own challenges. People are challenging, right? So when you're dealing with people in the most difficult times of their lives,

it just raises all sorts of issues for families and patients and that clinical team who often experience moral distress in their jobs because they're just not sure what the right thing to do is. So are there questions about relieving suffering, end-of-life cases, and what is an ethical way to relieve suffering? Somebody said, just give me a big, huge bag of marijuana, close the door, turn on the filter, open a window. I'm just gonna just do this until I just, you know,

can't feel anything. Is that, I mean, are there some limits of like, hey, we wanna relieve your suffering, but some of the means of doing that, we can't get on board with or. Sure. Yeah. I mean, you want us to do this thing that that's not really within our scope of practice or like, we don't, we want to control it. Right. Like in healthcare. And I understand this impulse. It's, we want people to die in the right way. So we need to control how you die. And so you need to do it in this way on our terms.

But lots of people like, you know, I just want to go home and I want to be able to live my life. And we say, oh, it's so unsafe for you to be home. It's you need to be here under our care so that those kind of tensions arise all the time. As you can imagine, if anyone has grandparents who like just don't want to listen to what their children or their grandchildren want to tell them about how to live their lives, which is totally understandable. We deal with all of that too. Yeah. Yeah. What about not just real quick, and I want to get back to disability, theology, disability. Um, what are some non end of life ethical questions that you have to wrestle with? So we do a lot with like, like children. so when are children allowed to make their own kinds of decisions against even their parents wishes which is always really difficult so um you know when

are children mature enough is it they magically become mature when they turn 18 not really um i've met lots of 25 year olds who shouldn't make their own decisions but i've also met lots of 14 year olds who are like really good at making their own decisions. So there's things that come up in that area. And yeah. So are they allowed to demand a certain kind of technology with I mean, you can just imagine during the pandemic, there's all sorts of I want this therapy that I heard on the news might work or I heard on talk radio might work. And the hospital saying, well, we don't we're not going to give you that because there's no evidence that that would help you in this time. And that was one of the most difficult things we dealt with during the pandemic was not only the just the distress of so many people dying, but so many people demanding therapies that had no evidence base.

And then how do you work with them to see that maybe that's not going to help them? That's got to be hard when the patient is self-diagnosing themselves incorrectly. And yet, isn't that kind of like, this is what I want. I'll pay for it. I'll do whatever. I want this. And is that kind of where the tension always is, is the patient making a diagnosis that the medical professionals aren't in agreement with? And then do you just give them what they want? Yeah. Right. Right. Because it's easy to just give them what they want. Right. If you don't, then you have to deal with the moral complexities of who has authority. Yeah. So the patient should have a lot of authority. It used to be,

used to be before I was born, people just trusted their doctors, right? You just, doctor knows best. You never questioned the doctor. I talked to older physicians who say this all the time. Nobody ever used to question me. But then there was a big patient rights movement where, you know, you should be making your own decisions. You should have all the information and that's really good. But that also then tends to skew the other way, the sort of pendulum swings where whatever the patient wants, the patient gets. But that can't be what we do either, because sometimes the patients want things that won't help them, won't actually hurt them. And as a professional who has a moral obligation

to help, you shouldn't be hurting your patients. So just because they want something doesn't mean they should get it. They're not, you know, this isn't just a market exchange. You are moral beings trying to heal people. And that creates some value conflict. I'm curious if you come across, there's a rare, I'll just use the phrase psychological condition, that might even be offensive to some, body identity integrity disorder, or body integrity identity, B-I-I-D, where somebody feels distress over the fact that they have a healthy body and they feel like they should have been disabled. So there's one story where a woman says, I identify as a blind person and she wanted, but she wasn't blind, but she, and it was causing her distress, like serious distress, the fact that

she had two functioning eyes. And so she asked medical professionals to make her go blind and they're like, we can't do this. And so I think she did it herself or something. And then another where I feel like I should have been born with a missing limb. I have two limbs. I'm distressed over the fact that I have two limbs. And, um, have you ever encountered, it's a pretty rare condition. Does that ever come up or, cause that would be, yeah, I've never seen it in real life. Right. So I've never in practice met a person who felt that way, but I have discussed it because it's theoretically so interesting. Right. So it is one of those, and it's actually like, it can be an easy example of saying, well, just because somebody doesn't want their arm doesn't mean a surgeon would take

it off. Right. So what are the conditions in which, you know, we would make a healthy person and I want to interrogate what we mean by healthy and unhealthy and normal and abnormal. But it ends up being sort of theoretically a very interesting discussion that gets into, I think, bigger questions about what the medical community's authority is. them. It's an interesting subject, not because it practically is happening all the time, but because it raises all sorts of questions about the limits of patient authority and physician authority. No, really. Because I mean, you could, I think, you could renew someone's arm and that's not a risk to their health. It's like 100 years ago, were they going to bleed out, get an infection necessarily? You can do that and they could still. And what if it does, what if they are genuinely distressed, like can hardly get through life by having two arms and removing one arm relieves that distress?

That's got to be – that's an interesting tension to live in. It is, yeah. And what does that say about bodily – like is there some sort of bodily integrity that we're supposed to be maintaining and it would be wrong to sort of go against, um, is that, will that person really be happy? I think we know from a lot of plastic surgery evidence that just because somebody is dead set, that if they change this one thing about themselves, they'd be happier. That doesn't always pan out for them. So there's a lot of unknowns there too. All right. Let's go to, let's go to more specifically a theology of disability. I guess my leading question is, what are some of the main theological questions within this, as you said, very tight-knit kind of small community of disability theologians? What are some of the main theological questions that disability theologians wrestle with and even debate?

theologians wrestle with and even debate. From the tiny bit I read, I know the impact of this quote-unquote fall. What impact does that have on disabilities? Is this a Genesis 3 thing? Is it a Genesis 1 and 2 thing? I don't even know the right way to frame that, but I would imagine that's one of the leading things that scholars debate. Do you agree with that? And can you unpack that? things that scholars debate? Do you agree with that? And can you unpack that? And what are some other things that scholars debate? Sure. Yeah, this is always a big one. Like, where does disability come from? Is it a result of the fall? Is it somehow tied to sin? And these were questions that, so there's a kind of, the initial disability theology book is Nancy Eastland's The Disabled God. And these were her questions. And I think that that book was written in the early 90s, right around the ADA. And so

these were questions that she thought, I mean, they were percolating in society, but were particular to her Christian context. And I don't know that we've, it's not as though disability theologians go, yep, she nailed it. Now we can stop talking about it. It's still a very live question, I think, because our traditions still harp on this question. is attached to the fall. But I think in our churches, this is the assumption. And so you are always having to address it because it is a sort of taken for granted assumption by a lot of Christians. Can you give us kind of two different sides of that question? And then we'd love to hear where you would land on that. Sure. And there are disability theologians who feel like it is tied to the fall. So we want to dismiss, I mean, there's pretty good like biblical passages where the disciples ask if the man was born blind because he or his parents

sinned and Jesus says no. And so we go, okay, well, probably then it's not personal sin, but that doesn't mean it can't be cosmic sin. So the fall not only made us, you know, immoral, So the fall not only made us, you know, immoral, like tending toward this sin, but it also degraded the entire world. So the whole creation feels the repercussions of the fall. And so then a lot of people will say, well, so things like illness and disability entered the world at the time of the fall because it had this cosmic repercussion for everything. So there are a lot of people who do feel that way. That doesn't mean God can't redeem disability or, you know, or heal disability, whatever that means, but they do want to tie it there.

And then I think there's some pushback to say, is disability necessarily a bad thing that entered the world? Or is disability a product of what it means to be a limited finite creature even adam and eve were limited finite creatures i don't see any evidence that they that they could like yeah they still had bodies right like what would it even mean to have a body that didn't bump up against other things that didn't in some ways couldn't get hurt like if i ran full on into a wall it it hurts, and not because, like, of the fall,

but because that's how bodies are structured. And so there's nothing necessarily wrong about that. We just have to, you know, sort of live with the bodies that we were given. So is disability more properly placed as a product of the fall or a product of just the kinds of bodies that God originally created? Okay. And that's a tension, I think, that lots of disability theologians struggle with. And I want to hear where you land on that.

But would it depend on the kind of disability too? I mean, it seems like if something like MS, something that causes a lot of distress to say, and this is just me thinking out loud in my minuscule knowledge of this conversation. So please correct me if I'm just completely out of the ledge. But if something's causing distress to say that would have been part of God's original design in his pristine world, that would seem to be raised questions about the goodness of God. pristine world, that would seem to be raised questions about the goodness of God. And yet, but then you said like, yeah, if Adam ran into a brick wall, slammed his head up against a brick wall, which just a finite human can do, it's not sin. It's not part of a groaning creation. Like, and he suffered some, whatever, some mental condition as a result of that. That's not,

you don't need Genesis three for Adam to run into a brick wall, right? Right. Yeah. I, so I think it's tricky in part because in our contemporary discourse, disability encapsulates a lot of different things. Sure. And, and that's purposeful because there's like sort of a solidarity building and community building that comes with clumping a lot of disabilities together. So to say that being blind is a disability and having MS is a disability and having something that causes a lot of physical pain and suffering is a disability, you know, we might respond differently to those kinds of things. I don't, so I think both that we kind of clump everything there makes it complicated. Um, so I, most people I know who are blind, don't think of their blindness as causing them suffering. And if they

do, it's because our society is really crappy to blind people. So it's more about the structures of society. And this was a big thing that came up with disability studies that a lot of disability theology capitalizes on too is what do we even mean by disability um so is disability a thing that happens to an individual body that places it in distress or is disability a social construct right that comes to the fore because we construct our society in certain kinds of ways. So, you know, maybe being a wheelchair user wouldn't be a disability if, you know, it was easy to access all the spaces that we needed with a wheelchair, right? It becomes less disabling of a condition if access is easy, if belonging is easy, if stigma goes away. So a lot of people with disabilities will say, you know,

the main distress I experience is actually not my physicality or the symptoms that my body experiences. It's the ways that people treat me. It's the inaccessible spaces. It's the feelings of not belonging. That's distressing. And that's a human sin. We could act differently. We could construct differently.

We could be better about these things. we could act differently we could construct differently we could be better about these things um for some people it really is their illness that causes like physical distress or physical pain and that's kind of hard to work your way out of in a social construct position but i'd say for me like if i'm there's some symptoms i experience where it's not necessarily all that painful it's terribly inconvenient and i don't have the kinds of resources I always need to make it easy to live in the world if you can't feel your legs, right? Or if you have a spot in your eye that just won't go away. But the distress is less about that happening and more about the ways that then I interact with the world because of the way my body is newly situated in that moment. So the distress I don't feel like

is, I'm not distressed about my body. I'm distressed about my body's interactions with the world that I live in. And, and I, that might sound maybe like I'm saying the same thing twice, but I do think it's different. It's not my body. That's the problem. It's the ways that my body is now interacting because I'm never just like a body floating in space. I'm a body that's situated. So that distress, you know, I want to be careful to say that that distress is often a social distress or a stigma distress. It's not a body distress. So would you say, you're such a good academic by giving all the viewpoints. I want to know what Devin thinks, but I'm catching it now. So is it kind

of a complex both and? I mean, nature, nurture kind of thing. Like so many things are kind of a complex blend of nature, nurture. But would you say that the social component is maybe more prevalent than some people might give credit to? Yeah, I think for me and for a lot of people i know with disabilities the social component is way bigger in their lives than the body component okay so we are working to change societies we're a lot more interested in changing the ways people think and the ways that things destructive than we are in changing our own bodies here's a question i often ask is and again if if i'm framing it wrong, please like feel free to like say, Hey, good question. Maybe word it this way next time.

You know, when I look at, when I look at kind of a natural law lens and I use this as a dumb example, but I like I'm born, I was born deaf in my left ear, which is not a big deal, except in small loud spaces, I get really stressed out and I want to go outside somewhere. But I look at it from a design perspective, and the creator designed humans with two arms, two legs, two ears. And this isn't just a decorative appendage. Like this was designed to receive sound. So it seems to me that like Genesis 1 and 2, where creation is resonating with God's design, this left ear would have heard. So for me, it's easy to reason like, no, something went wrong in creation that caused a part of my body that has a clear evidence of a certain design function to not do that.

Is my reasoning there? And this is such a – I hate even because it's like in no way am I comparing it to something like MS or blindness. It's like it's not that big of a deal. Unless my other ear goes out, then that's going to be a little bit frustrating. But yeah, is my reasoning, is that – going to be a little bit frustrating. But, um, yeah, is that, is that my reasoning? Is that, what are some holes to that? Or, um, or even somebody born say with one leg or something, it's like, well, God did seem to design humans with as, as bipedal, you know, homo sapiens mammals or whatever. Um, uh, so that is it wrong to say that fell short of God's design

through no fault of their own, through no whatever, but just that's part of the brokenness of creation? I know even that language can sound, maybe for some that could be offensive. I guess I'm wanting to know, first of all, is it logical? And then we can talk about how can we present that idea in a way that's not offensive? I don't know. Sure. So what you're saying is what a lot of folks write and say, right? So it does, and it makes a certain sort of sense.

And I, so just to say a lot, and there are lots of disability theologians who would agree with you. Um, so it does seem like there is kind of an integrity to this body. There are normal ways that the body functions. And so if it doesn't function that way, that that seems to be sort of wrong or broken or whatever. And a lot of these are kind of like either tinged with a moral valence that we find uncomfortable or their medical terms, which I also find uncomfortable. Um, I think at least for me, the problem with that is it assumes a lot about how bodies are supposed to function. I just don't think this, like as somebody who works in medical spaces a lot, like bodies are so vastly different.

And we have all sorts of weird organs that don't seem to do anything. And we just, I don't know that we know enough about the human body to say that this is the norm. And I get uncomfortable with the norm because I think we're all so diverse right and so yeah maybe it makes sense that the ears have input and that we're most people here and so we're supposed to hear but man it seems like a lot of people don't and a lot of people in the deaf community have this like incredibly vibrant way of expressing themselves that they wouldn't want to go into a hearing. They wouldn't want that hearing. And so do I look at them and say, oh, no, you're wrong.

You're just your body's broken and you've compensated really well for it. I think that that's not quite right. I think that there's gains to the body not expressing itself in the ways that sort of the typical or normal body does. And I think a lot of the work of disability theology is trying to trouble what we think of as normal. How do we know what's normal? Is it because like medicine told us that this is normal? Is it statistically normal? Lots of us aren't statistically normal. There's all sorts of things that can like the genome didn't tell us like what the standard is.

So this whatever the standard is, it seems to be a little amorphous. And the more we learn about bodies, the more that's ever changing. And so I get, I get a little uncomfortable with, with any certainty that we know what the body is supposed to be doing, especially like on some sort of divine level. Right. And then we put that back up. We say, okay, this is normal. God must've meant it to be this way. And if it's not measuring up, then somehow it's broken or flawed in a way that's not supposed to be. Um, I just think the more I learn about the human body, the more I think, Oh, I just don't know that that stacks up. There's all sorts of stuff that is happening. All sorts of complex ways bodies are formed that they're not just

like one-offs. We're all so different and the ways our bodies are functioning are very different. And so I hesitate to say that there's one norm that we should all fit into. And if we don't measure up, then there's something wrong. In my language, I've tried to stay away from normal, abnormal. I typically use typical or atypical. And this is because I do a lot of work in like sexuality and stuff. And so I never say if somebody's same-sex attracted, they're abnormal. That can be stigmatizing and really almost get like a moral evaluation.

Whereas I think atypical less typical or even like you know most gay people i know like the phrase you know gender or sexual minorities you know they do have a minority experience you can't deny that but how can we not yeah like uh abnormal just how it does tell me what stigmatizing. So yeah, I don't like that language. And this, first of all, everything you said is super helpful. And I'm not even saying I hold that view. I'm just, this is me kind of, are these the questions I should be asking? I still would see, I don't know, is this, well, again, this is more of a question, a genuine question. Like the variation in human bodies makes total sense to me. You know,

the variation in human bodies makes total sense to me. You know, the average height of a man is, in America at least, is 5'9", right? So if you come across a guy who's like 4'7", that's atypical or whatever, but that's still clearly a very – there's nothing – I think Genesis 1 and 2 humans would be 4'7", would be 4'10", be 7 feet tall is also a very atypical height. And maybe there's some pituitary stuff that went on that caused that. But that still seems categorically different than a clear like somebody born blind when eyes do – it seems to be a little more clear that God designed eyes to see originally and that something did go wrong. Not that they're wrong, not that they're abnormal, not that even they need to change to be a better human.

I think all those are off the table for me. this might've been like, I don't know, is it still wrong to say, you know, that eyes are designed to see something here? God's original intent was interrupted on some level or is even that, I mean, I don't know. I can see how that can still be stigmatizing no matter how you frame it. And if I was blind, I would probably push back to myself and say, why do you care? But I don't know, in people who don't have a disability, these are the questions they I would probably push back to myself and say, why do you care? But I don't know. In people who don't have a disability, these are the questions they sometimes ask. And they build assumptions about what they think without having a conversation.

And maybe that's my motivation for saying, let's open up the conversation so that we can all think better and more humanly about it. Yeah, I think we get a little stuck here because I do think that there's genuine pushback of like, well, just because that's how a lot of people's eyes function, does that mean that that's how God wants my, I mean, did God create one sort of prototype and then we all fit into it? Or could it be God's design that this person, their eyes don't function in that way and there's something important? You know, I do believe in providence, right? So it's not a one size fits all, but I do think we get, um, stuck here and it, it becomes a very academic conversation about the ways bodies are supposed to function and natural law. And, and I don't think that that's wrong. I think it's wrong when then it doesn't touch on real people's lives. So I've been in, I've had experiences where a group

of non-disabled people is telling a group of disabled people that they're broken and flawed and wrong and not listening to their experiences. And, and then, and then kind of smugly like, well, this is natural law and this is how it's supposed to work. Whereas, and then that person with a disability saying, but that's not how I experienced my body. And that's not how I don't feel like there's something wrong. Let me tell you about all the gains that have come from the way that my body is put together. And I think that's where, to me, like those experiences show me that we can get really caught up in that theoretical discussion about how bodies are supposed to be and ignore the actual person in front of us who's telling us about their experience and about how they understand their relationship with God and what it means to them, which isn't to say that their experiences

are somehow the trump card to every other discussion. But when a person with, you know, who is blind is telling you, I love my body, It's given me so much. I wouldn't want to know. I don't think of it as broken. And then we're saying, well, but you know, theoretically, natural law, you're wrong. Like that just seems so like we're using our faith as a weapon or we're using our intellect as a weapon against somebody's real lived experience. I had a, and we can, we can move on. I don't want to embody the very thing you're trying to push back against the kid who's stuck in this one. I had a, I visited the, the largest Bible translation for deaf people in the world. It's called Door International. The

chairman of the board that I run also started this organization many years ago. And, uh, in, uh, one of the main centers is in Nairobi, Kenya. And so I went beautiful campus of where they do Bible translation, which people don't see. Here's, here's where people's ignorance comes in. It comes in. They're like, wait a minute. They're deaf, not blind. They can read the Bible, right? Um, and the answer is kind of yes and no, but being deaf creates its own really distinct culture. This is something I had no clue about. And to go and worship with a bunch of people who were deaf, it's a very different experience.

And have them explain the different cultural beautiful. Maybe that's the key piece here. Some of the hidden beauty of this component of God's creation that is only experienced when a bunch of deaf people come together and worship Jesus and do life together. There is a distinct culture there that is part of creation. And this is me thinking out loud, disagreeing with what I said 10 minutes ago. If we just say that's Genesis 3 and not part of Genesis 1 and 2, well, I don't know. Is it just redeeming Genesis 3,

or is it actually a hidden part of Genesis 2 that we are able to experience? Because there's this beautiful community of deaf people who, in my limited experience there, I don't think any of them would have said, I don't want to be deaf. And maybe somewhat, I don't know. I didn't do a survey, but, um, they seem to be very happy in life and joyful and, and, and yeah. And talking to some of the directors are like, yeah, we don't have a lot of people saying, oh, I can't wait to

not be deaf anymore. You know? Um, what are some, uh, is that anything on by thinking out loud there? Is that kind of what you're getting at or, um, I think so. Yeah. Like, like what, can we embrace a kind of diversity that seemed to subvert even our own understanding of how bodies are supposed to function? And I think if we say yes to that, then we need to open ourselves up to the possibility that there is this, that kind of life-giving experience in bodies we thought shouldn't be that way. And then I think that should cause us to

question whether we are right about the ways bodies should be rather than saying, oh, they're just really coping well. But that brings us to the other kind of big hot topic in a lot of disability theology is like, what will bodies be like in heaven? Which is less of a theoretical, I mean, it itself can also be a really theoretical discussion. What does the Bible tell us about bodies in heaven? Not a ton. We have like Jesus's resurrected body. That was very strange. It like bore wounds, which is really interesting in disability theology. It could also walk through walls. I don't know what's going on with Jesus's resurrected body, but that's like the only body we have access to that tells us something about that. But a lot of people then, oh, well, if bodies just become non-disabled in heaven, right? Like if all the deaf people suddenly hear in heaven,

that kind of says that you don't really think it's good to be deaf now. So that's another way in which you can kind of weaponize some of that faith or healing narrative to say, really think it's good to be deaf now. So that's another way in which you can kind of weaponize some of that faith or healing narrative to say, well, it's fine. I suppose right now you're making the best of it, but in heaven, no one will have these kinds of disabilities. And if you think that they do, you know, what does that say about how we should be treating those bodies now? So that's another one. And of course it's, it's hard because we just don't, we don't have a lot of good, like there, there's a lot of theological work done. It just doesn't based none of, as far as I know, none of us have died in Quebec and told us what it's like to live, to live in that state. So there's a lot of conjecture there, but I think

the conversations are interesting in the sense that they bear real repercussions for how we think about bodies. What is the perfect body? What is the redeemed body? What is the resurrected body? So those are also big conversations that happen in disability theology. Where are you at on that question? Yeah, I mean, this one is so tough, too. I don't think that we all just suddenly become—I worry that when people say we all get get healed what they have in mind is a very again like typical like idolized body like a beautiful

body that we prize in culture but isn't the body that anyone's talking about in christianity right like we confuse like because it's strong and it's maybe it's 33. There's a lot of like theological work done on like how old your body will be. Yeah. My kids ask me that all the time. Yeah. Like what will you be? Will it be the age you died or would it be some like, but older people want it to be a younger body because that's the body that they remember being like a little bit more able. I want to be a 25 yearyear-old Brad Pitt when I imagine my resurrection. It's Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It or Fight Club.

No, Fight Club. I'll take Fight Club, Brad Pitt. Fight Club? Yeah. Okay. Not Legends of the Fall, Brad Pitt. I never even saw that one actually. Yeah.

Oh. I'll take Legends of the Fall hair but the body of the Fight Club where he had like zero body fat. Such a Western modern. right. Right. Yeah. So we can, that infects our brains though. Right. Like whatever's beautiful in our culture, that's the body that we want eternally. The Adonis,

we don't want the like crushed body of Jesus. Like nobody's like, gosh, I hope I have a bunch of wounds all over my body. And, um, but that's kind of the body that we're, that's the prototype, not the Adonis. So that's an interesting conversation too, about what would it look like? There's some interesting theological work. Like maybe we don't get those non-disabled bodies, but our bodies work in such a way that we can't even imagine it. So like maybe you still are blind, but it doesn't matter because eyes don't work the way in that afterlife that they seem to now, like that body is somehow radically transformed and

yet recognizable. Um, so there's a lot of people who, especially I think with intellectual disabilities, this becomes even more complicated because there are a lot of people who would say, I wouldn't be who I am without this particular disability. So Amos Young writes about his brother with Down syndrome and says, would he be if he suddenly didn't have Down syndrome? Would I recognize him? Would he be the same person? You know, that's so constitutive of his identity. Might that be sort of an affront to him to take that whatever it means to take that away? So that those are complicated conversations. him and his wife feel kind of called to, to that. They always have from the time they were like,

I think before they were even married, like they both felt called to raise Down syndrome kids. And that's, that's something that their kids are some of those beautiful humans you can be around. Like I feel like I'm around Jesus when I'm around their kids. And even, you know, they said like, you know, obviously it brings its own unique struggles and you know, how much is just intrinsic biology struggles, how much is societal struggles, you know. But they said they're also like some beautiful virtues that they embody that people without Down syndrome don't. Like the concept of like sharing or like whatever,

it's like they don't have – sharing is just their natural thing. They're just giving stuff away or somebody takes something from them. They don't even – there's nothing. There's no like possessiveness or whatever. They said there's just some beautiful Christian virtues that are directly connected to the fact that they have Down syndrome. Yeah. I mean, this is where thinking through the – limiting the conversation to just theological questions and answers can be pretty – if we begin and end there, then that's pretty bad. ecclesiological questions. What are some, and maybe some of it you've already touched on, but as the church thinks about being the church, being the body of Christ toward people with disabilities, what are some major blind spots that we, the church, have? And what are some

of the things that you would encourage a church to kind of maybe rethink some categories and so on? would encourage a church to kind of maybe rethink some categories and so on? I'll start with some really practical things. I would say every parent I know of a child with a significant disability has been asked to leave a congregation at some point. So, and that's just, it's a story I've heard so often that, I mean, this just has to be the number one place where we're looking is just like, stop asking people to leave because they're kids or somebody is disruptive, right? So they yell out or they don't sit still or, you know, they're distracting. Um, that kind of stuff is, and so they're asked to leave church and maybe not never come back, but like, you need to take him away because he's too distracting to us. You know, I'm Presbyterian. So like the

frozen chosen, you like to sit there very quietly and concentrate hard. So that is just so abusive. And those folks either start their own churches, right? Because they've heard it so many times that they feel called to begin their own church, which is amazing, but also sad that they can't find a welcoming congregation. So figure out ways to construct a church where you're not asking people to leave it if they're disruptive. Because that's just who we are as people. Like that's the chaos of the spirit. Like let's welcome the idea that people don't fit a mold and they're not going to sit still and they're not going to say the right things and do the right thing. Like whatever right is in church, lots of people aren't going to fit that mold and we need to make space for them as well. So and we need to make sure if it's not from, sometimes that comes

from the pastor, but often it comes from other people in the pew. Like you need to get, you need to leave. I'm your kid is so distracting. So we need to be better about how do we help parents? And it's not just parents because there's lots of adults with disabilities too, who struggle with sitting quiet and still in a church pew. So how do we create space for folks like that where they feel welcomed in a space? And they're like, bare minimum, we're not asking them to leave the church. That's horrendous. So I think creating spaces for folks

who need like sensory inputs need to look a little different for them. I think we need to really struggle with what it means to have like special ministries. And this is a big topic in a lot of pastoral work and disability too. Like, do we just segregate all the people with disabilities off into their own little room or do we incorporate them into the larger body of the church? You know, it does seem like there is space to say, you know, lots of people with disabilities, there's times when I only want to be around other people with disabilities. I just, I'm,

I'm sick of everybody else that I, that those spaces are important, but, uh, I don't think that we should have the kind of ministries where we're always segregating people with disabilities into their own spaces. Um, so I, I worry that we might, It's sort of like in this mirror is kind of the education debates to about mainstream kids versus special ed classrooms. I think we need to struggle with that in the church more. I think we need to watch our language a little bit better. And you'd asked about language earlier. Yeah. Disabled. Disabled is the right word. is the right word. Most people I know with disabilities, especially young activists, want to say disabled. It's not offensive. It's the proper term. And it's really the other terms that are offensive, like differently abled, like that, that actually really ruffles a lot of people's feathers. Because again, it's like sort of, it's saying that there's something wrong with disability.

If you have to use a euphemism, then you're implying that the disability itself is somehow bad. So just, so there's a lot of disability pride movements that happen now where we're just embracing that term. Just, we'll say, just call me disabled, call it as it is. There's still some debate about person first language versus disability first language, which is, am I a person with a disability or am I disabled person? Okay. And there's, that's still a live debate. Again, I think a lot of people are more comfortable with the disability first language. I don't say I'm a person who's a woman. I, I, you know, that's not how I would describe my gender. So why is it the way I describe my disability? So those are live debates, but for the most part, disability is

the right term. Don't use euphemisms, but I think that there's other language problems around metaphors for disability that, um, really ruffle feathers too. This just happens. I mean, open up a hymnal. There's a lot of like, I was blind, but now I see, um, we, we use disability as a metaphor, but always as a negative metaphor. There's never like, I was paralyzed with joy, right? You're always paralyzed with fear. You're blind to the truth. You're deaf to goodness, those kinds of like, so we're always using disability categories as a negative metaphor for ways we're failing spiritually, which is sort of a double heaping on of stigma. But that stuff is really hard to get out of your language. So once you start paying attention to it, you're like, oh my gosh, a lot of our, a lot of our

language is steeped in disability metaphor. Well, it's hard because some of those are rooted in Scripture, right? Right, right. Yeah. So what do you do with that then, right? But that does, just because they're rooted in, I mean, this is me thinking out loud, that doesn't mean they are therefore, what do I want to say here? I'm wondering just because it's contained in scripture, does that mean that scripture is trying to say this metaphor is sanitized and should be used for all time or was it simply helpful back then? I don't know. You have the same thing in the race conversation.

When black sheep is bad and black is associated with sin. And, you know, I have a game. What's that game? Oh, gosh, I'm blanking on it. Anyway, there's a little person, a Catan. Catan? Have you ever played Catan? Oh, like Settlers? Settlers or Catan, yeah. And you have the little person you put on somebody that's the robber.

Well, it's a black piece. It's like – and it's so easy for white people to just not – oh, you put the black guy on my – and he's – it's like, yeah, but those – that builds underlying just bad thoughts and ideas and it reinforces things that probably should be addressed. Real quick, so you said person with a disability or a disabled person, there's some debate about that. If somebody had to use one of those, what would be the default, the safest, the person with a disability? Like, is that going to be, or is it kind of like, maybe just ask the person what to say or? Always ask, right? So that's, that's always the first rule is you should just ask somebody because they will tell you what they prefer. Right. So that's that's always the first rule is you should just ask somebody because they will tell you what they prefer.

You know, maybe a couple of years ago, I would have said probably person first language. But these days I get a lot of pushback from young, excited disability activists who actually think we need to get that out of our vocabulary altogether. So I think it's a real live debate right now. So I think we're in the midst of like a really interesting language conversation that is not. And I think some people will say, oh, this is just a language game. It's not just a language game. The reason that people came up with person first language is because they felt like they or their loved ones were being seen as less than human beings. So they wanted to say person with a disability because they wanted to remind you that this is a real person and that they're not just their disability.

And the pushback now is I want to embrace my disability. It's okay for that to be like an identity marker for me. And so it's actually really important that I say that first, because then you know who I stand with. And so these aren't just like kind of like tricky vocabulary games. These are meaningful expressions of how this person situates themselves. But I can't tell you which is safer. So it's always safest to ask. Or if you're speaking, if you're on stage speaking publicly, and you don't have time to ask the thousand people you're speaking, if you're on stage speaking publicly and you don't have time to ask the thousand people in your congregation, if you interchange them back and forth, does that kind of show that you're not planning your stake in one or the other? That's what I always do.

I use both. And if I'm writing, I write a footnote. I'll say, footnote, I'm going to say both of these things and here's why. Is the term neurodiverse, is that similar to what you said about differently abled or is neurodiverse fine? That's good. So that is a word that has come out of conversations about being on the spectrum. And it really is sort of that community saying, this is how we want to think about this. So I would say neurodiverse is the right terminology for that community. Okay. Not – what about, hey, I have a friend whose kid is on the autism spectrum.

Is that – I mean, if they're fine with that, then obviously it's fine. But even on the autism spectrum or is autistic the kind of worst default you can have or not necessarily? Not necessarily. I mean, I think the more preferred terms these days are either neurodiverse or on the spectrum. So neurodiverse actually encapsulates more than just autism spectrum. So it is slightly different in that. I would say most people would prefer on the spectrum to autistic. Um, but, but some people still use autistic to describe themselves. So who am I to say that wrong? Lamar Hardwick, I've had Lamar on the show and he, you know, he has his, I think his, uh, handle or his website is the Autistic Pastry. That's right. And so I'm really persnickety with language.

And again, in LGBT stuff, like transgendered is offensive where transgender is the term. And people are like, well, it's just one letter. I'm like, I know, but sometimes one letter can be a big deal. So you wouldn't say on the autism spectrum, you would say on the spectrum

without even saying autism or does it matter? Uh, I don't think it matters. Most people I know are perfectly like when you say on the spectrum, people get what you mean. So maybe that's more of an insider. If I'm speaking to a group of people with disabilities, we can kind of use some shorthand. Sure.

But I suppose if I were talking to a larger group of people who were not as familiar with that community, I would probably flesh it out a little bit more. So going back, and I'm going to be sensitive to your time. everybody with a kid with a disability or even an adult has been told you're disrupting the service. What are some other maybe blind spots that the church has that they should think through some other categories? Yeah. And I'll just point out for the sake of humor that you said blind spot,

right? So. Oh my word. It's so hard, right? These are, it's part of our vocabulary in a very deep way. Yeah, so don't ask people to leave the church. Don't always separate people into different sort of segregated spaces. Try to figure out ways you can incorporate the whole body of the church as often as you can.

Real quick, I'm sorry to cut you off. I just asked you a question because I wanted to ask you this before. So special needs ministry, you're saying those can be helpful as long as there's both of special needs ministry and opportunity to integrate people in that ministry into the greater church.

So it's kind of a both and. Like just having special needs ministry isn't in and of itself wrong. It's just when they're just cloistered in that space 24 seven in the church that that's where it gets unhelpful. I think so. That's just when they're just cloistered in that space 24-7 in the church, that that's where it gets unhelpful. I think so. That's what I'm hearing from most of my friends who do that sort of ministry is that there is kind of a move to getting more and more incorporated into the body of the church and less and less segregated. So not, and I just,

I think, like I said before, there are times when it is nice to have those separate spaces, but as long as it's not only that, I think, but I think the more you can integrate the better, the more people, the more people I'm talking to are saying that's kind of the moves that they're trying to make is more and more integration versus more and more specialization or segregation. Okay. Okay. Good. Sorry. So I cut you off. You're going to talk about something else. Yeah. Um, yeah. Watching the metaphors. I think how we preach and pray for people with disabilities. So also the other thing I know, and I've seen, I've experienced this, I'm not terribly disabled, so I don't get this very often, but everyone I know who looks disabled has had somebody pray for them, like somebody they don't know, pray for them to

be healed. Like on the street, I've like walked around with people and had very well intentioned people come up and say, I want to pray for you right now. And then they pray that they become non-disabled. It's offensive. Like you just don't know what, and it's, even though it happens all the time, it's always like shocking. I just can't believe the audacity of people to do that. And, and my, most of my friends who've had this happen to them are very patient people and very kind people. And still, it hurts them. It hurts them. These are negative experiences. So I would never pray for somebody to be healed who didn't ask for that or who you didn't know wanted that. So I think be really careful about that. Be careful about the healing services that you have in churches. Again, if we're not asking people what they want to be healed from or of, we shouldn't assume it's their biology.

We shouldn't assume it's their disability. Um, so I think that kind of like prayer on people who didn't ask for it happens all the time and it's like, can really hurt people. And then the ways that we preach about those healing narratives. Um, So my good friend, Bethany McKinney Fox wrote a really lovely book about how to think about the healing narratives in the, in the gospels and, and ways that we might subvert some of the common medicalized readings of those. Okay. One more quick, I have so many questions, but I want to honor your time. You go to church, you meet a guy in a wheelchair, a girl in a wheelchair. Is it better to, is it good to say, Hey, tell me, how did you get in? What happened to you? I'd love to hear what happened to acknowledge it. Or do you just pretend like you don't notice anything or does it depend on the person um i would not start a conversation with what happened to you um i would also not

pretend like it's not they're not in a wheelchair so there's something in between there right like i think it's nice to get to know people before asking their disability origin story. Right. Like, um, it's, if I met a gay person for the first time, I would, well, tell me about your coming out story. I wouldn't, that wouldn't be the thing I lead with. Right. It just is a, it's not necessarily offensive, but it's just weird.

It's a weird, like as if that was the most important thing to know about them. Right. And that's probably not the most important thing to know about them. So I think get to know people and that will come out organically. So don't be worried or troubled about forcing that conversation, but also like, yeah, don't hover over people who are wheelchair users and pretend as if they're not sort of in that wheelchair. Right. Like, and what's the best thing? I did a lot of that too. Yeah. And I wouldn't say what happened. That's a terrible way of saying it, but, um, what would it do? So just, you know, it happens all the time. What happened to you? Um, what, what, what is the best

language to use? Like in, in that situation, like even now I can't think of, uh, trying to think of what would be the least offensive way or, um, after say you've been talking to him for a while, I'm trying to think of what would be the least offensive way or after, say, you've been talking to him for a while. You don't want to just walk away from the conversation without saying anything. Or maybe you do. Maybe you just wait until it kind of comes up in the natural conversation. Yeah. I mean, I would hate to be too overly prescriptive about this because people are different.

And some people appreciate being asked and telling their story story and some people are just sort of over it. So I hate to say like there's one size fits all for this. Some of this is just like being a person who has to interact with different people, but I don't, most people I know who are wheelchair users are not offended by the question of like, Hey, how did you come to be in a wheelchair? Or, you know, tell me about what it's like to be in a wheelchair or, you know, I think, but I think it helps if you have a base of friendship. This is maybe I should say the other thing that I think people should be doing in church is a lot of research shows that people with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, aren't befriended. They don't have friends. And, um, that's, that's really hard for anybody,

right? Like we all need friends. And I think it's because it's for a lot of reasons, but people are afraid or people don't know the right things to say or, and so they just kind of keep away instead of, you know, learning how to be with them. Um, and, and that's so huge in our congregations is it feels like they belong there, but also has friends. Um, so if we have children with or without disabilities, they should be befriending people, the other children with disabilities. Like we need to make this part of the ways that we rear children and the ways that we think about ourselves as church. Cause that friendship problem is a big one.

One more question. I promise I'll let you go after this. Do you think every church should have an interpreter? Sign language? Is that like a given? Of course. I do. You know, I think it's hard because these things can be expensive and complicated. But when I hear people say, oh, well, we don't have anybody who needs the interpreter. Well, of course you don't because they're not going to come to your church if they can't understand what's going on. Right. So, you know, not, I will say this, not every church is going to be an accessible space for everybody, you know,

and this is some work I do with my students. Like if you have a congregation that is full of a lot of people that are hard of hearing and you, it's important that you make things very loud and clear, that might be sensory difficult for somebody on the autism spectrum. So you are going to have to decide. You're going to have to make some real decisions. I just want churches to actually think about what those decisions are. Who are we catering to?

Who is the community we want to build? Are we going to be off-putting to some people, and are we okay with that? You know, do we want to be, even like the sermon itself, like, do we have really academic, long-winded sermons that are just going to be irrelevant to people who don't think like that, or who have a hard time processing auditory information. There's all sorts of things I think we should just be more conscious about and the ways we structure church services and who's going to be hurt or helped by the ways that we do that. Devin, thank you so much for your time. This has been, I could keep going on and on and on. I have

so many questions, but thanks so much for giving us an hour. And yeah, many blessings on your work, your life, and your ministry. Yeah, thank you so much. It was nice to talk to you.