My daughter’s first year of Vacation Bible School, she decided halfway through the week that she didn’t want to be a Christian.

I learned about her decision from a teen volunteer, who came to find me, ensconced in the nursing mother’s room at the church with my three-month-old.

“Um, your little girl is in the atrium renouncing her faith,” the volunteer relayed. “She says she doesn’t want to believe in God anymore? I thought I should, like, come and get you?”

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As the last sibling was deposited curbside with the usual barrage of I-love-you, please-tie-your-shoes, don’t-forget-to-turn-in-your-field-trip-form, see-you-soon, my little guy looked at me and asked, “Mommy, is it Fursday?”

“It is Thursday,” I confirmed.

“YES!” he called out, his footie-pajama-clad feet kicking high into the air. “I love Fursday! I can’t wait to get home and rest!”

Suffice it to say, we have kept our Thursday morning sabbath.

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“I read the Bible,” Scott Morris recalls, “and I couldn’t help but notice everything in there about healing the sick. It is on every page.” But when he looked at the churches around him through this lens, Scott wasn’t satisfied with what he saw: “We pray for people on Sunday morning, the pastor is expected to visit people in the hospital, a few people visited the shut-ins, and that defined our healing ministry.”

“It’s very easy to just focus on the medical aspect of our work, but what we’re really trying to do is live out the Gospel,” Scott says. He cites Plato’s view of mind/body dualism—the idea that we are separate parts dust and breath—as a “fundamentally non-Christian idea.” Human beings cannot simply be broken down into component parts, with separate entities caring for our health, our faith, our other needs, and have no communication between those caregivers. We are created whole, in God’s image, and should be treated as such.

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I first learned about nonviolence from a bull.

My childhood copy of Ferdinand was beautiful—the red cover, the flowers, even the lettering. I remember very clearly the way the light and dark shading of the font played together in perfect harmony in the title on the cover.

What I remember most is the picture of Ferdinand sitting, all by himself, under the cork tree. And how the story tells us that “His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit there and be happy.”

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Back and forth we dance: Wait. No. Wait. No. Wait.

When the dishes are done or the sneaker is tied or I’ve spelled “antidisestablishmentarianism” yet again (that can’t really be one of their spelling words, right? Someone is pulling my leg?) I ask her what she wants to tell me. And her firecracker light is even brighter, her all-consuming need to tell me that she made up a new song or renamed her pony or can’t find her Elsa glove is even more important to her than it was two and a half minutes ago, because she had to wait.

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Watching their son walk toward the school building on his first day, Auggie’s parents (played by Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson) hold on to each other, emotions writ large on their faces. Then his mother prays: “Dear God, please make them be nice to him.”

I don’t know what it’s like to raise a child with visible disabilities, but I resonate with Auggie’s mother’s prayer. In my world, disabilities are hidden. In my world, children look like they might be able to blend in—but they never can. And so I pray for everyone who interacts with my family: “Dear God, please make them be nice.”

When we finished praying, my eight-year-old blurted out, “Can I eat my card?” I was trying to decide if not eating the prayer card was going to be my hill to die on, when he paused, green card halfway to his open mouth.

“Actually, I don’t want to eat this,” he said. “This is a prayer. This is important. I want to send this to Washington, D.C.”

The film brings viewers right into the middle of Justin and Patrick’s friendship, and the depth of their relationship is apparent. As is their humor: when the camera focuses on Patrick, exhausted and slumped over for a much-needed rest, Patrick then looks at Justin and says, “Okay, seriously dude—it’s time to walk.”

I see you on stage at the school play, or lighting the candles as an acolyte, or twirling through your dance recital and I know what it cost you to get up there and do that, and my heart is bursting for you. In this broken world, I want you to know that I don’t just see your brokenness—I see your beauty. Because we are all broken, we are just broken differently.

When the fidget spinner first started out on its meteoric rise, I thought, how cool. Something that was originally the primary province of the “special needs” community has gone mainstream—and with it, perhaps, the ability for more children to find points of connection with children like my son.