Who Is This Man?Primjer

When I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong

I recently read an article that speaks of a “theology of disability,” which explores how the divine is present in limitation and suffering and handicap. It reminded me of someone I met a few years ago at an event where I spoke, a man named Dick Hoyt. When Dick’s son Richard was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. He was brain-damaged; he would never be able to walk or speak.

Dick and his wife brought Richard home to care for him. When he was eleven, they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University to see if a device could be invented to help him communicate. They were told that his brain was incapable of comprehension.

“Tell him a joke,” Dick said. When they did, Richard laughed. So the department constructed a computer that allowed Richard to laboriously type out a sentence by hitting a button with the side of his head—the only part of his body he could move.

When Richard heard one day about a benefit race being run to help a young man who had been paralyzed, he typed out a sentence: Dad, I want to run. By this time Dick was forty, a self-described porker who had never run over a mile. Yet he somehow pushed his son in a wheelchair over the entire race course. Afterward, Richard wrote the sentence that changed Dick’s life: When I ran, I didn’t feel disabled. So Dick began to run — a lot.

We watched videos of this strong father pushing and pulling and carrying his son over two hundred triathlons. More than eighty-five times Dick has pushed Richard’s wheelchair the 26.2 miles that make up a marathon. Dick’s best time is a little over two and a half hours—within thirty minutes of the world’s record, which was not set, as sports columnist Rick Reilly observed, by a guy pushing his son in a wheelchair.

I praised Dick that night for being a hero. But Dick said that his hero — his inspiration, his courage, his reason for running — is the 110-pound motionless, speechless body of the man in the chair. His son’s body was weak, but Christ’s power was strong.