Most of us reach for a solution before we have learned a person’s name. We offer a prayer for healing, a suggestion, a hand on the wheelchair, or we finish someone’s sentence. Over one week, this guide asks you to notice that reflex in yourself and then practice a different response: friendship. You can work through it alone, a section a day, or with a group that meets at the start and end of the week.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. John Swinton, professor of Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen, who worked for years as a mental health nurse and hospital chaplain. His answer to the fixing problem is easy to state and slow to live. The church becomes the body of Christ through friendships across difference, the kind Jesus offered. Before you can offer that, you have to see what you already assume.
Days one and two: watch your first move
Start with one line from Scripture: “for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). In context, God is correcting Samuel as he looks for Israel’s next king among Jesse’s sons, so this is not a verse about disability. It does name a habit every reader shares. We size people up by what we can see, and we do it quickly.
For two days, do not change anything. Just observe. Whenever you meet someone whose body or mind works differently from yours, whether in person, at church, in a video, or when a friend mentions a relative, note what you do first and what you feel. Record the move, not a verdict on it. Looked away. Started explaining. Offered help before being asked. Spoke to the companion instead of the person. Felt pity. Felt nothing in particular.
Swinton names an assumption that often sits underneath these moves. Asked what single picture of normal the Christian tradition tends to carry, he laughed: “Well, everybody should look like me.” He then asked who in any real room actually fits that picture, and concluded: “We kinda make it up as we go along.”
Hold your notes next to that line. The question is not whether you are a bad person. It is whether your first move treats your own body as the measure. A fixing reflex usually does. Lisa Fields described the pattern from the observer’s side: when a disability is visible, “we automatically kind of just focus in on that without realizing that is a person.”
If you live with a disability, you may know this reflex from the receiving end. Use these two days differently if you like: notice when others reached for a fix, and when someone simply treated you as a friend.
Day three: the names we give
Read Genesis 2:18-20 twice. The key line: “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19). Observe before you interpret. Who brings the creatures? Who names them? What does the narrative say happens once a name is given?
This is narrative describing the first human task, not a command about disability, and Swinton’s use of it is an application. He treats naming properly as a basic human responsibility and defines stigma as a failure of naming: “The stigma is when you reduce a whole person to one part of them.” His example is a person whose large nose is the only thing anyone mentions. “That’s what stigma does. It takes away your personhood and simply makes you that one thing.” He applies this especially to mental illness, asking why a church would call someone a schizophrenic rather than call him by his name.
Today’s exercise. Go back to your notes. In each encounter, what name did you silently give the person? The man in the wheelchair. The autistic kid. My aunt with dementia. Write it down. Beside it, write what you actually know about that person apart from the condition. If the second column is empty, you have found your starting point for the rest of the week.
Day four: what Jesus offered instead
Read John 15:12-17, then linger on verse 15: “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you” (John 15:15).
Jesus says this on the night before his death. What reason does he give for calling them friends? Notice that it concerns what he shares with them, not anything they have achieved or repaired in themselves.
Swinton contrasts this with how friendship usually works. Most of our friends look like us and go where we go. “That’s not what you see in Jesus. Jesus seeks out and offers friendship to people who are different.” He admits the difficulty: “It’s very simple, but at the same time, it’s complicated.” Fixing keeps you in control. You define the problem, the success and the finish line. Friendship gives up that control. It has no finish line, and it expects you to receive as well as give.
Today’s exercise. Choose one person you know who lives with a disability or a mental health condition, someone you relate to mainly as a helper, worrier or observer. Do not tell them they are part of an exercise. Contact them today with no purpose beyond the relationship. Ask about something other than their condition, and listen. If they bring up their disability, follow their lead without steering toward advice.
If you cannot think of anyone, treat that as information rather than failure. Use today to ask why your circle looks the way it does.
Day five: who needs whom
Read 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 in one sitting, then return to verses 21-22: “And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary” (1 Corinthians 12:21-22).
Paul writes to a congregation in Corinth that ranked its members by their gifts. His point concerns the whole church, not disability as such. Still, notice the word he chooses for the members that seem weaker. Not tolerated, not served: necessary. Swinton draws the conclusion that each member matters however articulate or inarticulate, because “you’re necessary for the body to be the body.”
Fixing assumes the need runs one direction. Paul’s image assumes the body is incomplete without the members it thinks it is helping.
Today’s exercise. Think about yesterday’s conversation, or any friendship across disability. Write down one thing that person gave you: a perspective, a kind of patience, a way of praising, a joke, a correction. If nothing comes, ask honestly whether you were open to receiving.
Day six: test your own picture of the future
Now the strongest objection. Jesus healed people, and longing for healing is not a failure of faith. Doctors, therapists and nurses do real good, and Swinton was a nurse for many years. So is the urge to fix simply love?
Sometimes it is. Medical care, practical help and prayer for healing all have their place, and nothing here asks you to withhold them. The difference is whose agenda drives. Care responds to what a person needs and wants. The fixing reflex responds to your discomfort and your picture of who they should become. No passage promises a particular healing to a particular person now, so no friendship should wait on one.
Swinton tells of a woman in one of his classes, completely without hearing, who described through her interpreter a dream of meeting Jesus in heaven. She said his signing was amazing. He does not turn the dream into doctrine. He uses it to show that “sometimes when we’re imagining heaven, we imagine it through the eyes of what we can already see and know.” A hearing person’s heaven is also a guess shaped by a present body.
Today’s exercise. Write two or three sentences describing how you picture resurrection life for the person you contacted on day four. Does your picture require them to become more like you? You do not need to settle what resurrection bodies will be like; Christians read those details differently. If the person lives with dementia, add one more line. Read Colossians 3:3, “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God,” and note Swinton’s observation that “your body remembers things,” such as patients who seemed distant all week joining in the Lord’s Prayer. What familiar prayer or song could you share with them on your next visit?
Day seven: return to where you started
Reread your notes from the first two days. Then make contact again, with the same person or someone new, and follow one guideline Swinton gives the church: “the key is always to give people the benefit of the doubt.” He was speaking of people who cannot put their faith into words, but the instinct reaches further. Assume there is more to this person than you can see, and that they know things about their own life that you do not. Let that shape what you say and what you leave unsaid.
Afterward, compare. Did your first move change? Some readers will find a friendship starting. Others will only see the reflex more clearly, which is still more than they saw a week ago.
For groups
Meet once before day one to read this guide and agree that no one will be pressed to describe their encounters. Meet again after day seven. Some people in the room may live with a disability or care for someone who does, and talk about how to help them can easily become talk about them. Invite those members to speak if they want to, and never ask them to serve as examples. If grief surfaces, especially around dementia or a family member, let it be grief rather than hurrying toward a lesson.
Questions for discussion
- What surprised you when you watched your first moves on days one and two? Was there a pattern you would rather not have seen?
- What names do churches commonly use for people with disabilities or mental illness, and what does each name assume?
- Where is the line between caring for someone and trying to fix them? Can the same action fall on either side?
- Suppose the person you reached out to does not want your friendship, or turns down help you thought they needed. What would honoring that look like, and how would you know whether you were respecting them or simply giving up?
- Friendship across difference costs both people something. What might a friendship with you cost the other person?
- Does your picture of heaven assume your own body as the standard? What would it mean to hold it more loosely?
- For anyone who lives with a disability: what has a true friend done that a would-be fixer never did? You are free to pass.
Carry one question beyond this week. The next time you feel the urge to help someone, ask whether the help is for their good or for your comfort, and whether you have learned their name before forming an opinion about their life.