“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”– Genesis 11:1-9 (NIV)

More than once, it had occurred to me that it would be nice if more people in my country knew American Sign Language. As a deaf person, communication with the vastly hearing population in my community would much, much easier.

For many of us in the D/deaf community, we tend to face multi-level challenges due to the lack of access to various services in the community. D/deaf individuals need sign language interpreters because lip-reading is a tedious, impossible method to gather complete information of what is being spoken and hearing individuals usually do not sign. Plus, not all D/deaf individuals lip read.

Lip reading, also known as speech reading, is a skill that is 90% guesswork and luck. We should not be placed in situations where we are required to have full hearing in order to understand and have access to spoken information. Communication should not be gambled on whether the person will be able to guess accurately and be lucky enough to have someone who does not have – say – a murmuring way of speech (lips that barely move, even if the spoken words may be clear to hearing individuals).

Systematically, we do not have access to hospital services, job interviews, court proceedings…we usually are denied the request for a sign language interpreter during interactions with the police, and even in the education field.

As one professor that I worked with in the Lexington School for the Deaf noted, many of the challenges faced by the D/deaf community is “about having access to language.”

Language holds power.

This is not limited to the D/deaf community alone.

Hearing individuals also face struggles when they interact with others who communicate in a different language.

Whether we are hearing or D/deaf, whether we prefer to speak or sign, we give preference to those who communicate in the same language as us. We shun and ostracize those that do not share the same language.

Instead of focusing on what divides, let us focus on one thing we have in common: Christ died for us all. Through His selfless sacrifice, we received the proof of the most important thing that Christ spoke to us in the most universal way: love.

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.“- Romans 5:8 (NIV)