“First? First?” My big brother Joe approaches my mother asking her the question. His thick eyebrows furrow over his eyes. He taps his index finger indicating the number one: “Fiiirst?” He gets within a few inches of her face, waiting for my mother’s reply.

“First RELAX,” she sighs, overwhelmed by Joe so close to her as she tries to prepare breakfast.

“And then?” Joe asks.

“Then Joe goes to school, comes home, rollerblades, eats dinner, takes a shower, reads a book and goes to bed,” she complies. Joe walks away smiling, satisfied for the moment, only to return five minutes later with an assertive “FIRST?”

This was a common scene every morning at the breakfast table in my home. Repetitive behavior and resistance to change in routine are part of a developmental disorder, autism, which is increasing in diagnoses every year. This disability hinders social development and communication skills. My brother has trouble maintaining eye contact, he laughs and cries for no apparent reason, and he has difficulty answering open-ended questions. He speaks, but he mostly mimics lines he hears on television — specifically phrases from Sesame Street or Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

I wouldn’t have my brother any other way, but I do wish that more people would take steps to learn more about the developmentally-disabled. As we know from history, where there is a lack of understanding, there is trouble. This trouble manifested itself for my brother in many ways. When my brother was in elementary school, another student forced him to drink water from a toilet bowl. The kingdom of God is not here.

On a whim two summers ago I took a job at an agency that worked for disabled children and adults. I got to meet a lot of interesting people — one being a 10-year-old girl, Madeline, with a rare metabolic disorder that affected her speech and her ability to walk. I was a substitute for her favorite care-taker, who was out with a broken arm, so it took Madeline a while to warm up to me, but soon we were playing with her dolls, watching Veggie-tales, and she would even occasionally let me read her journal entries: “Dear diary, It was rainy today. Katie is here. Well, I’d better go!”

Even though she could not stand up, or speak clearly, I couldn’t pity Madeline even if I wanted to, because she was always so content. During the previous school year, she took a class trip to the local Ronald McDonald House, a charity for families in need; and that summer, she decided to have a lemonade stand to raise money for it. We made signs and drinks, and told all the neighbors. Madeline sat outside for hours while customers came and went, bringing in over five hundred dollars (from many generous givers) for the RMH. It was incredibly humbling to see a 10-year-old disabled girl organize her own charity fund-raiser.

That same summer, my parents decided my brother was old enough to take the next step in his independence. He moved into a group home with four other disabled residents, with 24 hour staff supervision. The following summer, I got a job at a group home in New York with 10 residents. There were many training videos I had to sit through, but there is one I can’t get out of my head. It was news coverage of an abuse scandal in a group home. It showed clips of staff yelling at and sitting on residents. “This is the only language they understand,” one staff said, trying to justify herself. Another clip showed two staff entering a sleeping resident’s room, turning on the TV and folding laundry on top of the sleeping girl.

Most of us believe that we would never tease or mock a disabled person, and we know we certainly wouldn’t abuse them. But there are many, more subtle ways that people treat the developmentally-disabled as less than human. One day at my job, I had to take a resident to the ER. When the nurse came, she looked at the resident, then looked at me and asked “Can she talk?” And before I could answer the resident exclaimed that she could indeed talk.

It’s clearly not the duty of every Christian to volunteer for the Special Olympics, or to participate in events like the Walk for Autism. After all there are still wars that need to be ended, whales that need saving, and several other causes that God puts on our hearts. But I do believe that is the responsibility of every Christian to educate themselves enough to neither be fearful of nor inadvertently unkind to their fellow human beings.