Ah, Thanksgiving. That festive time of year where we gather around the table with family, friends, or those who are like family to us to share in a feast of turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and all the foods that can fit on one plate and then some. While Thanksgiving can be about the food and the endless hours of football on television, it also provides us an opportunity to give thanks to God for the blessings we have experienced in life.
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.
Ah, Thanksgiving. That festive time of year where we gather around the table with family, friends, or those who are like family to us to share in a feast of turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and all the foods that can fit on one plate and then some. While Thanksgiving can be about the food and the endless hours of football on television, it also provides us an opportunity to give thanks to God for the blessings we have experienced in life.
Parents go through five phases as they raise their children with disabilities. It’s helpful for ministry leaders to understand these phases so we know better how to support families in these different seasons. In this episode, Sandra Peoples shares characteristics of the phases, the needs parents have in each one, and how the church can support them along the way.
“I shared my family’s hurt and pain of feeling excluded and unaccepted by the very church that I, as its pastor, am called to love and serve. I shared offensive words shared with me regarding my autistic son’s needs. I shared how these actions created a wall between our family and the church. We felt unwelcome.” Shannon Blosser shares about church hurt, and where the church can grow.
“I am disabled. For years that was so hard to admit. I couldn’t mention out loud my neurodivergence. I whispered about my post-traumatic stress disorder, insisting ‘I’m better now.’ I was a champion for the disabled who didn’t want to talk about her own disabilities. It was disingenuous, but I didn’t know how to come to terms with the fact that I was disabled. I was still scared that admitting my disability publicly would convince people I was not able to do anything.” Joanna French writes on her experience with disability.
In this week’s episode, Garett shares a follow up story on a message from a previous episode while also discussing how the apostle Paul’s words of encouragement to the church at Philippi should also be a message of encouragement to anyone on the journey to take the hope of Jesus Christ and the love of his church to the special needs community.
