Elaina sits down and talks with Lisa Jamieson from Walk Right In Ministries about family caregivers, the holidays, and ways the church can better support them.
The training, content, gatherings and experiences that we’ve created for pastors, church staff and ministry volunteers produced with the assistance of like-minded colleagues serving in disability ministry have become our principal service. So much of what we’re able do to help churches welcome and support families, we accomplish by bringing together experts from other ministry organizations.
November is Caregiver Awareness Month. As someone who became one of my dad’s caregivers before I started school, I grew up thinking everyone in the world was aware of caregivers and caregiving. As a young adult my husband and I cared for a son born with a life-threatening medical condition, and his typical sibling. As members of the sandwich generation, my brother, sister, and I cared for our mother for 15 years after she was diagnosed with dementia. This explains why, when I first heard that November is Caregiver Awareness Month, I was incredulous, and I still am.
In this episode, Lauren Hickman shares her personal journey and calling to disability ministry, describing how God has guided her every step of the way to serve families impacted by disability.
In today’s episode, Sandra talks about the challenges small to normative-sized churches face in disability ministry and shares how the churches she’s been a part of have overcome these challenges.
Each summer, our Shine Disabilities Ministry team hosts Camp Freedom, which an action-packed weekend where campers with intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities experience summer camp in a way they most enjoy. The blessings and the memories and the logistics from the event always leave me asking “How did we do that?” But as we see through the ministry of Peter and John in Acts 3-4, we didn’t do any of it. The Holy Spirit did it!
We are living in times ripe for the history books. Most of us have been weighing questions on topics ranging from the effects of isolation to medical vulnerability, racial equity and religious freedoms. Leaders in the disability movement are keenly aware of overlaps and similarities among the issues at hand. I’ve been praying that God would use this season to grow us into more compassionate and courageously engaged people, because we desperately need to start appreciating our uniquenesses and enjoying how interconnected we are.
I’m willing to guess that everyone on the planet has experienced life off kilter in some way this year. Wow! 2020! A year we won’t easily forget. Life right now is hard for so many, feeling messy and downright immobilizing. There’s much confusion and unrest in the world today. What do we do? What do we believe?
Just a handful of weeks into the pandemic quarantine, I was already starting to take stock of lessons God was teaching me. In the course of time and in the newly emerging chaos of rushing back to “normal” life, I’m already struggling to remember, let alone walk out, the lessons I was so certain would not leave me! How about you? During meetings with disability leaders and a recent check-in call with a group of pastors who are navigating ministry in these times, I have heard valuable insights from varied fronts.
Learning to travel light took many years of practice. Then I found out that I not only needed to travel light on the outside, but on the inside as well. I discovered that darkness and heaviness on the inside would leave me with mental and emotional challenges. I would become weighted down from the load, unable to think or feel clearly. As we rely on Him, He not only tells us what to carry, He also enables us to do so.
I often say that my son Joel, who has autism, has been the greatest spiritual teacher of my life. The lessons haven’t always been easy, and sometimes they’re not clear until later. But year after year after year, Holy Spirit knowledge pours forth from this young man and blesses all whose eyes and ears are open and receptive. And that includes his church.
Keep listening to the voice of God as you ask: What gift has this person been given by God that might benefit those around them, and especially the Church? A person just being present is a gift to those around them. Who are we to judge who can and cannot have a relationship with God, or who can and cannot serve Him?
Worship for me was turned upside down when I found myself on the floor a few times in tears, literally. Pain, heartache, changes worship. Praising God for who he is and not what he does for us makes it come straight from the gut. Maybe that’s what God wanted all along from me, worship from the deep.
