“What you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting rosed in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are -- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself -- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one's fellow human beings and for that matter one's fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and make the name of Jesus honored in the world -- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.”
Source: Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
“One of the cruelest tricks our culture plays on autistic people is that it makes us strangers to ourselves. We grow up knowing we're different, but that difference is defined for us in terms of an absence of neurotypicality, not as the presence of another equally valid way of being.”
Source: Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking
“Diagnosis (of autism) is such a clinical word to describe a moment in which your humanity is so deeply affirmed, understood, and valued.”
Source: Unclouded by Longing
“I spent many years being a square peg and trying to bash myself into a round hole.”
Source: My Autistic Fight Song: My Battle into Adulthood and the Workplace
“By the time I entered education in the late 1980s, schools were about as well adapted for my neurotype as a set of stairs is adapted for the use by a Dalek.”
Source: Untypical: How the World Isn’t Built for Autistic People and What We Should All Do About it
“Today you tend to the flower of autism in your interior garden with love. You celebrate, rather than hide away in shame, your idiosyncratic ways and behaviours, and whilst there are many different kinds of wild and colourful flowers here, few have not been touched by the fragrance of autism.”
Source: Unclouded by Longing
“What she didn’t realise was smug smiles and shitty comments from people like her, was what fueled me to prove them wrong.”
Source: My Autistic Fight Song: My Battle into Adulthood and the Workplace
“They're less careful, less capable, and yet somehow the truly terrible things never happen to them. People want to help; they attract kindness---they're looked after by guardian angels wherever they go.”
Source: Homecoming
“A diagnosis is not a prediction. It doesn’t tell you what’s possible. It doesn’t change you, your colleague, your child, or your friend. It just opens up tricks and tools to thrive.”
Source: Notes for Neuro Navigators: The Allies' Quick-Start Guide to Championing Neurodivergent Brains
“Rather than lacking a theory of mind, it is argued here that due to differences in the way autistic people process info, they are not socialised into the same shared ethno as neurotypical people, and thus breaches in understanding happen all the time, leaving both in a state of confusion. The difference is that the neurotypical person can repair the breach, by the reassuring belief that ~99 out of 100 people still think and act like they do, and remind themselves that they are the normal ones.”
Source: A Mismatch of Salience