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.
How much stress do we put on ourselves to have our house perfectly decorated, so we can “enjoy it?” How much tension do we carry trying to navigate the family dinners and getting worried about our own “Cousin Eddie” showing up and making a scene? How often do we fill up our schedules with parties, events, and celebrations because we feel we have to do it? How often do we get to Christmas Day and have nothing left to give when it comes time to truly celebrate the incarnation of Christ and the Lord’s presence in our lives?
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!
