When I was a kid in Marblehead, Massachusetts, there was an old man who rode a big yellow bicycle around town.

You’d see him outside the pizza shop or the corner store, hovering on the edge of everyone’s errands. His face looked a little different. His eyes didn’t quite land where you expected. And then there was his mouth—sudden bursts of swear words and insults, loud enough to make moms pull their kids closer and teenage boys snicker behind their hands.

We didn’t have language like “neurodivergent” back then. We had the word “retarded,” which adults tossed around like a diagnosis and a dismissal all at once. Somebody told me there was “something wrong in his brain”—too much of this, not enough of that, misfiring wires—and that was that.

The kids did what kids do when nobody has taught them to do better. They poked at him for fun, just to see if they could make him explode. The world treated him like a sideshow.

Meanwhile, at home, both of my parents were quietly living with their own disabilities.

My mother’s chart could have been a whole shelf in the DSM:
   •   Bipolar disorder
   •   Seasonal affective disorder
   •   Borderline personality disorder
   •   Anxiety, panic attacks, depression
   •   Suicidal thoughts
   •   Anemia and dyslexia for good measure

From the outside, people saw a fun, smart, generous single mom who cooked gourmet dinners and danced to Earth, Wind & Fire, Prince, and Quiet Riot in our tiny living room. They didn’t see the days she locked herself in her room and cried until her face swelled. They didn’t see the panic that came with winter. They didn’t hear the quiet conversations about wanting to disappear.

My dad had multiple sclerosis.

When I was young, he looked “fine” to most people. Walked normal. Talked normal. Suit and tie, news on the TV, the whole thing. MS is sneaky like that at first. For me, the disease showed up in his voice before it showed up in his legs. Phone calls turned into short bulletins about the weather and the headlines. His words started catching, sticking, looping. During visits, I caught strangers giving him that look—half pity, half curiosity—wondering what had happened to him.

So early on, my idea of “disability” split in two:

• The obvious kind, like the man on the yellow bike—public, messy, easy to mock if you’re cruel.
• The invisible kind, like my parents—either hidden behind charm and competence or slowly creeping into view.

Fast-forward a few decades.

I’m in my bed in Ohio, sprained foot, scrolling through Facebook. That cursed infinite column of other people’s lives.

On my genealogy account, I read a post from a woman grieving her sister. On my regular account, I see a friend of a friend in the hospital, covered in rashes, fighting something the doctors can’t yet name. A little further down, there’s a prayer request for a young man who collapsed in downtown Columbus. A stranger saw him fall, ran to him, and started CPR right there on the sidewalk.

I almost died about a year ago myself. My heart nearly stopped twice—once on a job, again under anesthesia while they installed my pacemaker. I’ve had people stand over my bed and pray out loud because they weren’t sure I’d wake up. The thought that my wife might have had to figure out life without me still makes my stomach flip.

So these posts land hard.

Then another video pops up in the feed. Dr. Phil. Studio lights. A young woman sitting in the guest chair, her face ticking and twitching, her voice firing off bleeped-out swear words and the insult, “You’re bald.”

Tourette’s Syndrome.

The caption says something like, “How could anyone think she was faking this?”

In the comments, a woman asks the question I’ve heard my whole life, even if people don’t always say it out loud:

“Why is it always swear words and insults?
Why don’t people with Tourette’s shout nice things? Why not poetry? Why not Bible verses? Why not something kind?”

It’s a fair question, if you don’t know anything about brains.

Someone replies with a simple explanation: Tourette’s is tied to differences in how certain parts of the brain—the basal ganglia and frontal cortex—control movement and impulses. Speech, it turns out, is partly a motor function. When those circuits misfire, words can pop out like involuntary movements.

There’s a technical term for the kind of tics that involve shouting obscenities: coprolalia.

But the key point is this:

• The words that escape are usually the short, emotionally loaded, well-rehearsed ones.
• Swear words. Insults. Taboo phrases. The things that live closest to the surface.

Our brains store them where the emotional heat is.

Neutral words don’t get carved into the pathways the same way. “You’re wonderful and deeply loved” doesn’t stick in the nervous system like “You idiot.” Complex, kind sentences are harder to blast out in one uncontrolled burst than a tight, sharp curse.

So when the brain’s filters are thin or glitching, the heavy stuff slides out first. It’s not that people with Tourette’s want to be offensive. Most of them are painfully aware of how they sound. They’re embarrassed. Ashamed. Exhausted.

It’s not a character flaw. It’s wiring.

But reading that explanation did something I didn’t expect: it turned the question back on me.

If Tourette’s makes the brain release whatever is most accessible and emotionally charged, what does my mouth reach for when it’s under pressure?

What sits on the top shelf of my brain?

Because the input is constant:

• The TV shows my wife and I binge so she can forget her anxiety for a while
• The horror movies and metal I grew up on
• The background swearing at construction sites
• The songs stuck in my head from high school
• The sermons I stream on good days
• The fear-soaked doom scrolls I fall into on bad days

If someone flipped off my self-control switch for five minutes, what would spill out of me?

• Curses or prayers?
• Sarcasm or blessing?
• Bitterness or gratitude?

The Bible has a verse that keeps boomeranging back to me:

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right,
whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
— Philippians 4:8 (NIV)

I don’t live in that verse all day.

Most days, I live in a world where horror movie killers are printed on socks in the Walmart men’s aisle. Jason’s mask. Michael Myers’ dead eyes. Ghostface with the knife. Six-year-olds dress up as serial killers for Halloween. Adults like my friend’s son — who has Down Syndrome and would never hurt a fly—dress up as Jason too because they like the thrill of the character.

I’m not anti-horror. I own some of those socks. I watch those movies. I love metal. I’m not trying to pretend I float through life on a cloud of worship music and sunshine.

But if Tourette’s exposes the words we rehearse the most, then disability is holding up a mirror:

• What have I been rehearsing?
• When life hits me hard—my heart stops, my wife and I fight, the bills aren’t getting paid—what language comes sprinting out of my heart first?

Is it, “Jesus, help me”?

Or is it something I wouldn’t want my church kids to hear?

At the same time, disability exposes how we treat each other.

My wife works with adults who have developmental disabilities and brain injuries. Some were born with their conditions. Some were changed by accidents or abuse. Some carry diagnoses that make people uncomfortable: psychotic disorders, severe autism, violent trauma, addictions, gender confusion.

The world (and, sadly, a lot of the church) tends to sort people into categories:

• Cute and acceptable – the smiling kid with Down Syndrome on the poster.
• Complicated and inconvenient – the addict who can’t stay clean, the person hearing voices, the person whose body and sense of self don’t line up, the guy on the yellow bike shouting obscenities.

We’re so quick to link suffering with blame:

“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
— John 9:2

Jesus’ answer wrecks that whole equation:

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
— John 9:3

That doesn’t mean every disability is a neat sermon illustration where God swoops in, heals the person, and everyone claps. In her favorite place I spread my mother’s ashes. I’m hundreds of miles away as my father fades. My own heart needed a mechanical assist. Plenty of people are not healed on this side of heaven.

But it does mean this:

Disability is not a cosmic “gotcha” from an angry God. It’s a place where His grace shows up. A place where weakness and dependence yank us out of the illusion that we’re in control.

The apostle Paul talks about a “thorn in his flesh”—some kind of ongoing affliction—and says he begged God three times to take it away. God’s answer wasn’t, “You’re being punished.” It was:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
— 2 Corinthians 12:9

I don’t have final answers about why some people are born into bodies and brains that betray them. I don’t know why my heart stopped twice and then started again. I don’t know why some people walk away from car accidents and others spend the rest of their lives in wheelchairs.

But I believe this much:

• Every person with a disability—whether you can see it from across the street or it’s hidden deep in their nervous system—is a person made in the image of God.
• The way we respond to them reveals what we really believe about grace, justice, and mercy.
• And the words that fly out of our mouths—in anger, in stress, in fear—reveal what we’ve been stocking on the shelves of our hearts.

So when I watch a girl on TV tic and twitch and shout out something crude, I try—imperfectly—to remember:

She’s not a joke.
She’s not a demon.
She’s not a moral lesson.

She’s a mirror.

She makes me ask:

What would spill out of me if my filters broke?
And am I willing to let God change what I keep within reach?

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For Further Reflection:

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The questions raised in this piece — about disability, suffering, misunderstanding, and the words we keep closest to our tongues — echo three scriptures that continue to shape my thinking:

• 2 Corinthians 12:7–10 — Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” and God’s answer that “my power is made perfect in weakness.”
• John 9:1–3 — Jesus’ correction when asked who sinned to cause a man’s blindness: “Neither… but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
• Philippians 4:8 — The invitation to think on what is “true, noble, pure, lovely, admirable,” and to let those things carve the deepest grooves in our hearts.

These passages don’t “solve” disability or suffering.

But they do remind us that:

• Weakness is not failure.
• Difference is not sin.
• And what spills from us in unguarded moments reveals what we’ve been storing inside.

If these verses speak to you, I encourage you to sit with them in the quiet — read them slowly, ask what they stir up in you, and let them open a door to God’s presence in your own story.

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A Short Prayer

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Lord,
teach me to see people the way You do —
not by what they can’t control,
not by what the world calls “broken,
but by the image of You inside them.
Help me to fill my heart with what is true and good,
so that when life bumps me,
what spills out looks a little more like grace.
Amen.