This is the Baimal Podcast with Marty Salman. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we are joined again by Kevin Chandler of We Carry Kevin to continue our journey through the Gospel of John exploring the healing of the official son and the healing of the pool of Bethesda.

Yeah, great follow up to our conversation in our last episode. So if you didn't listen to that one and you're like, wait, who's Kevin? We can go back and listen to the last episode. Get a hear all about his story.

His nonprofit is book We Carry Kevin and you can definitely listen to that before listening to this to get some perspective. But I'm really excited about these two stories today to get Kevin's perspective.

Especially in the second story, I ran across his thoughts and they just rocked my world. So interested to get to that. But first of all, before we even get into this conversation.

Kevin, I wanted to ask you about something. Let's see it was 150 episodes ago. We were talking about the Gospels and we were walking through Matthew.

And I was doing a teaching in episode. I can't remember what 102. I'm not even sure what it was 102. Yeah, 102. And we were talking about the man who is paralyzed who is lowered through the roof by his friends, which is such a fantastic thinking about last episode.

What a great story.

Because it's the faith of the friends that Jesus sees. And I just love that. Nevertheless, and all throughout that story, I kept referencing this man as the paralytic, the paralytic, the paralytic and somebody graciously but sternly wrote me an email and let to inform me that that that was ableist language.

I had never run into the term ableist or ableism before. And in a world where we're becoming so much more aware of these things and the normative experience and the ways that we have marginalized or oppressed or prejudiced ourselves against others.

It was just not a corner of the world I had ever ventureed into before. So I started doing like this quick little education and realized what they were talking about and what I had unintentionally done. And so we did a video that will link in the show notes to that episode, an addendum video where I just kind of like grapple with that and talk about empathy.

And surprisingly enough, I got a lot, I got some dislikes on that video. I don't know what I could have said. Apparently empathy is a bad idea.

That's sarcasm for anybody to catch that. But anyway, I became aware of this larger conversation and debate within the disabled community. And I think I'm using that term correctly. But even now, I want to be aware of those kind of things.

Of condition first versus identity first language. And the one thing that I learned that day is I, as I probably need to be more aware and very much try strive to not use the term like paralytic because it, it's just it can, it confines this whole person's experience into that one identification.

And there's a larger conversation of is it a man who struggles with being paralyzed or is it a paralyzed man. How do you talk about the identity and there's kind of like this debate and the community about what they prefer.

And there are many people seem to say there's like a majority opinion, but it's just a majority opinion because there's also a significant my, it's a slight majority.

So Kevin, how do you prefer that when it comes to that, how do you prefer people talk about you and your condition and one of the things we're going to say right up front that I know you are adamant about is this is not a monolithic conversation.

And you don't represent the community as a whole, you only represent yourself, you have your perspective, yeah, and you can't speak for others. And so saying that what, what has been your experience or your perspective on, on your condition and how people talk about it and you.

So I think that it is a conversation we have, but I think also, because I think words matter, it's not, I don't think words matter words do matter.

That's how it is. And, and so yeah, it's definitely something to consider and to bring into conversation. But also words, words represent thought and words express what's going on in the heart and mind.

So, if we just stop with language, then, then we're going to, we're not going to get very far. And so I've had people use, you know, person first language identity first language, however, you want to, want to term it, use the politically correct language.

And actually hurt me more than someone who doesn't, because they just don't know, you know, or, or they're close to me and comfortable saying whatever.

And so I think it goes beyond which word you use, you know, it's kind of like, I know some parents that raise their children, this maybe controversy as well, but they raise their children not to, not whether or not to swear, but are you, what words are you using, how are you using that to hurt people or to express yourself, you know, it's, it's one with argue that it's worse to use.

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