What do you expect to see?

Sometimes it not only matters what’s said (or seen) but the context and how it’s framed. Today is the Sunday between Ascension (when Jesus went up into heaven) and Pentecost (when the Holy Spirit came down from heaven to the disciples). I’m crow-barring in here the idea that where things and people are makes a huge difference. Since Jesus and the Holy Spirit are both parts of the three-part God (doctrine of the Trinity here if you’re feeling strong enough) it shouldn’t make much difference which was on earth, should it? This time of the Christian year says that it really did. Jesus the Son of God ascended into heaven, but the Holy Spirit came down and inspired a group of people who had been Jesus’ followers to form the world-wide Church.

A life of difficulty

Have you heard the analogy that neurotypical people have one brain operating system and neurodifferent people another? If I find life difficult, it’s because I’m trying to run Mac programmes on an Apple, or vice versa. There’s a lot in that but it might seem to imply that there are only two types of people whereas of course we’re all different, even while we have some characteristics in common. So I like another analogy I came across this week – that every human life is like a computer game and most people have the “brain type” setting on “easy”, whereas I have and other autistics have it set on “difficult”. If you think about that you can see how transformative it might be if you’ve lived all your life feeling you were a bit of a failure suddenly to discover that you’ve had things much harder than everyone else, so if you failed relative to them, that was only to be expected.