God Made Me On Purpose
I posted a clip of old footage not long ago with a caption that said the whole thing in one breath. I believe God put me here for a reason, chair included. That’s the issue he gave me. We’ve all got one.
It’s still sitting in my notifications, comments piling up, and I’ve been answering them one at a time as they come in. Most of them are one word. Amen. Blessings. Brave. Prayers for you. People mean it kindly, and I believe nearly all of them. A few stop to explain the theology to me directly. One woman told me flat out that God did not put me in this chair. I wrote back that I believe he did, specifically for this purpose, and that he can take me out of it if he wants, but I’m content working where he put me.
None of that is what I actually want to talk about, though. Every morning, I decide not to let this chair turn me into somebody I don’t want to be. Not bitter. Not owed something. Not a victim working an angle. That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire trick. And it isn’t a trick only available to a guy in a wheelchair.
I’m a believer. I think God put me here on purpose, and on purpose with a purpose. That’s not a line I reach for when I need to feel better about a hard day. I don’t think I’d be this guy without it. But I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to hear that and think I’m about to tell you I’m special. I’m not. The chair isn’t the hard part. Choosing, every single day, not to be a worse person because of it, that’s the actual work, and it has nothing to do with the chair specifically. Anybody reading this has their own version of the chair. A body doing something it isn’t supposed to do. A house that’s gone quiet in a way it wasn’t supposed to. A diagnosis, a divorce, a bank account, a parent who wasn’t what a parent should have been. I’m not asking you to have mine. I’m telling you the door on yours opens the same way.
There’s a version of this some people hand back to me instead: not God made you on purpose, but God made you to teach the rest of us something. They sound almost identical. They are not the same sentence. The first one says I’m a person. The second one says I’m a flashcard, and I don’t think God built me wrong so I could be somebody’s flashcard. He built me like this on purpose, the same careful way he built the woman telling me he didn’t. My body isn’t a typo he’s planning to fix in a later edition. And the only thing I’m doing with it that’s worth calling impressive is getting up and choosing, again, not to be lesser about it. You can do that with whatever you’ve got. You don’t need my chair. You don’t need my faith either, if it’s not yours. You just need the decision, made daily, the way I make mine.
That belief doesn’t make my life easy. Faith was never a coupon for an easier life, and whoever sold you that version sold you a knockoff. There are nights the math doesn’t add up and the chair feels like a small room I can’t get out of. I don’t pretend those nights away. I just don’t let them make the next morning’s decision for me.
The strangest version, and I get it more than you’d think, is when people comfort me about a body I never complained about. One day I’ll be healed, they tell me. Up there I’ll run. I actually believe that part. Scripture says so, and I don’t hold it loosely. What I don’t believe is that this life is just the waiting room for the real one. I’ve got a job in front of me right now. It counts on its own, not as a placeholder for who I’ll be later. And when that day does come, I don’t think it just brings me up to even with everyone who’s had two working legs the whole time. I think it’s worth more than that, because I’ll be the one who knows what it was like not to have it. They never will.
Here’s where I actually land on the word inspiration, since I’ve spent this whole piece picking at it. I’m not against it. A guy wrote in under that same video, a different platform, and told me straight that watching what I deal with and what I still get done is more than he’s managed some days, with a body that’s never given him any trouble. Then he told me the real thing underneath it. He’s been told his whole life he’s funny, funny enough for an open mic, and he’s never done it. Scared of failing, plainly, he said. I told him: who said I wasn’t afraid of failing too? There’s a difference between being afraid and letting it own you. If he started writing today and went to an open mic, what would he actually have to lose?
That’s the whole essay, honestly. Everything before it is just how I got here. I’m not asking you to admire me from a chair you’ll never sit in. I’m asking you to go do your own version of the thing I do every morning: decide, on purpose, not to let whatever you’re carrying turn you into somebody smaller. Nobody needs my permission for that. You already had it.
