Lessons in Asking For Help!

Maybe God put it in my mind - you never know...

In this memory, I was 8 years old and climbing what seemed to me to be a massive geometric climbing frame. It was in the playground of my primary school, anchored into solid earth and worn out grass. No safety flooring underneath - just solid earth.

Lots of children had 'come a cropper' on this climbing frame with broken or bruised limbs and bumped heads.

Looking back, I remember the teachers would watch the boys climb right to the top and sit on the large joining plate in the centre, but would caution the girls about doing the same.....

But I did it anyway.

By this age I was a very competent tree climber, so rightly assumed I could do this too. When the teacher was distracted I climbed to the top and sat on the joining plate like many boys before me and......no one noticed!

It then occurred to me that I wasn't sure how to get down. This was very different to tree climbing where there was always something to grab hold of as you climbed down.

I was determined NOT to ask for help!

I was the girl who had succeeded in getting to the top (although unseen). I didn't want to be the girl who couldn't get down again as this would dismiss the triumph - people wouldn't remember I actually got to the top, just the fact I needed to be rescued!

So, with absolute determination and more than a little fear, I planned my route and started to slowly make my way down. I even managed to get down before the end of break bell!

The thing is; my determination to not be 'the girl who had to be rescued' meant that no one knew about my triumph of getting up there in the first place!

In remembering this childhood escapade, it reminded me of how I now often do life.

I still have that determination to do stuff - even more so if people tell me I can't do it because I'm disabled.

In the same way teachers tried to put the girls off climbing (and many of them believed the teacher that they couldn't or shouldn't climb), there are times today when people can almost put me off trying. I have to process what they say for a bit longer now and then go for it anyway.

But I still have that notion that if I have to ask for help - It devalues what I am doing.

Some of this is imposter syndrome - a common enemy of women in all forms of ministry. But a lot of it is what many with a disability call 'internalised ableism' and also wrongly assuming the assumptions of others.

For example, internalised ablism and making assumptions about how other view me is what stopped me using a wheelchair for many years when I so desperately needed it.

Internalised ableism said - "This will make me look weak and unusable".
Assumptions about what people would think said - "No one will want to use you in 'that thing'".

This is a journey that many learning to live with the onset disability have to go through. Our own uneasiness of using aids to function and worrying about what other people think.

Sometimes our fears about what others will think are well founded and we will still get the crass comments and misunderstandings. Often it's hard to deal with that and move on.

I get it.

I've been there

I think I was reminded of that brave, climbing frame child for a reason.

To teach me something and to remind me how far I have come.

Asking for help hasn't and doesn't nullify all that I have done with and for God. It doesn't make all I have achieved in life 'less than'.

I've gone through so many years refusing to ask for accommodations to help me, such as paperwork emailed before hand so I can enlarge it (or produced in 18pt clear font), or even asking for a specific space in a room so I can exit easily rather than always having to wait for the room to empty first (rooms full of people sitting round tables is a nightmare for wheelchair users!).
This is because I had assumed how people would view me: 'Less than and a pain in the bum'.

Yes, I have had people see me as the awkward one for keep asking, and I have frequently had people not book me for training and speaking only because I use a wheelchair. But I'm trying not to let that influence me in the same way the teachers of long ago influenced the would be climbers into not going to the top of that climbing frame.

Those people are wrong, their view is not Godly and I can do nothing about it.....other than one thing. I need to remember the views of others are not my responsibility and it's not up to me to change that view. I must leave it with God and the Holy spirit to challenge them.

Asking for help may be difficult for you and I, but I've found over many years of being stubborn, that my assumptions in this area were wrong.

Asking for help doesn't make what I do 'less than' and it rarely stops those I work alongside seeing what I do for them positively.

When Samuel was searching for the next King, God taught him a valuable lesson: "...The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." (1 Samuel chapter 16 verse 7. NIV)

Look after your heart.

Climb the climbing frame.

Ask for help if you can't get down.

God sees and won't forget what you did in climbing it.

Just ask.