Zechariah is an old man who had always garnered respect from the people around him. He had even held the honor high priest for a time. When he entered a room, people would hush for a moment out of deference to the stature of his reputation. Or at least they used to, until that fateful when he met an angel in the Holy of Holies. When he lost his voice, people at first treated him with still more respect, but that began to fade after a few weeks. Far from noticing him with respect, many people from his community failed to notice him at all.
He had once been recognized as the greatest mind in the hill country. Families would come and beg him to instruct teenage sons in the law and the Torah. No one came around anymore. His wife’s joy at becoming pregnant made it still harder for him. He wanted to be happy for her, but he just felt more isolated. Now, people would travel great distances to see the miracle of his old pregnant wife. They would smile at him warmly but then ignore him for the rest of their visit. He didn’t blame them, of course. What was the point of speaking with him if he did not know how to respond?
Yet Zechariah was no fool. As the months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy dragged by, he reflected on how even this apparent curse was really a blessing. His quiet, more solitary life left him with plenty of time for prayer and introspection.
He began thinking deeper thoughts about God and about life than ever before in his long life. He also thought of the many around him who had lived their whole lives with one disability or another. Some were blind, deaf, or crippled. A few were mute like himself, but they had all gotten better than him at finding ways to communicate.
He began watching these other people more carefully, these people who were so accustomed to being ignored or disregarded. He realized that each of them had so much more life in them than he had ever imagined. They had such joy and purpose in life. The rest of the world might have seen them as somehow broken, but they did not see themselves that way. They just saw themselves as… themselves. Their disabilities were part of them, but they were not defined by them. They were defined the same way as everyone else, by how they lived and how they loved.
On the day Zechariah’s son John was born, he was shocked to find his feelings bittersweet. He was thrilled to be a father at last! He also felt relief to recover his voice, and yet, he found himself only hoping that he would be able to hold onto the grand insights that such a time with a disability had been able to grant him.
Throughout this next month, please pray especially for the needs of disabled persons.
