Most people remember the story of the paralysed man in Luke 5 for its drama: the friends climbing onto the roof, pulling up the tiles, lowering their friend on his mat into the middle of the room where Jesus was teaching. It is a wonderful picture of determined, stubborn faith. Jesus, seeing their faith, forgives the man and then heals him, and he walks home carrying the mat that had carried him.
But before the roof, there was a door. Luke says plainly that the friends tried to bring the man in, and could not find a way, because of the crowd (Luke 5:18-19). For everyone else in town, the house was open. For the one man who could not walk, it was closed.
That detail is worth sitting with, because many of our homes, churches and streets still work that way.
Thresholds most of us never notice
If you walk easily, you probably do not see the barriers in your own house. The two steps up to the verandah. The raised concrete lip at the front door that keeps rainwater out. The bathroom door that is a hand’s width too narrow for a wheelchair. The toilet squeezed into a corner with no room to turn. The light switch too high for a child or someone seated. The bedroom upstairs with no bedroom downstairs.
Those details did not seem to matter when the house was built. They matter the day your father has a stroke, or your daughter comes home from hospital in a wheelchair after an accident, or your oldest friend, now on two sticks, wants to come to your fiftieth birthday and cannot get up the steps. Then, suddenly, the house is like that crowded room in Capernaum. Open to everyone except the person who most needs to come in.
The friends who refused to give up
What the friends did next was not tidy. They damaged somebody’s roof. They interrupted a teaching session full of important people. They probably showered dust on the heads of the Pharisees below. Jesus did not scold them. He saw their faith.
There is something here for families caring for someone with a disability. Faith sometimes looks like prayer, and sometimes like four tired people with a mat and a plan. It can look like the brothers who spend a weekend breaking out the front step and pouring a ramp so their mother can get home from rehab. Or the church youth group that carries an elderly member up the stairs every Sunday until the church finally builds a proper access. Or the couple who decide, before they build, that the house will have one bedroom and a bathroom on the ground floor, even if nobody needs it yet.
Building with the door open
It is far cheaper and easier to plan for access than to break concrete later. If you are building or renovating, it is worth asking your architect or builder about:
- At least one step-free entrance, with the path to it wide and firm enough for a wheelchair or walker.
- Wider interior doors and corridors, at least on the main floor.
- A ground-floor room that could become a bedroom, and a bathroom nearby with space to turn and walls strong enough to take grab rails later.
- Level or flush thresholds, with drainage designed to keep water out without a raised lip.
- Switches and sockets at heights that work for someone sitting down.
None of these make a house look like a hospital. Done well, most people would never notice them. They simply mean that when life changes, as it does for almost every family eventually, the house can change with it.
Beyond the house
The same questions apply to the places where we gather. Many church buildings across the Caribbean were built in an era when nobody thought about ramps. Some have steep steps at every entrance and a single narrow toilet up a flight of stairs. Members with mobility problems quietly stop coming, not because they have lost faith, but because they are tired of being carried, or embarrassed to ask.
Jesus once told a host that when he gave a feast he should invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind (Luke 14:13). It is hard to invite people to a house they cannot get into. An accessible entrance is a way of saying, before anyone arrives, “You were expected. We made room for you.”
Seeing the one at the edge of the crowd
The most striking thing about Luke 5 may be that Jesus looked up. With the room packed and the religious leaders watching his every word, his attention went to the man coming down through the ceiling. He noticed the one who had been kept out.
Most of us are not going to rip open a roof. But we can notice who cannot get through our doors, and do something about it. Sometimes that means a builder and a bag of cement. Sometimes it just means offering an arm, moving the party to the ground floor or asking, without embarrassment, “What would make it easier for you to come?”
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