every story has two sides. but.

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As I re-launch the blog, I'll be re-posting one or two old posts a week for the first month or so. These are posts that I find particularly relevant and needed, not only when I wrote them originally but also now. Today's post was originally published on January 27, 2012 (back when I only had two little ones and one day before I would find out about an orphaned baby girl with cerebral palsy in Taiwan who is now our youngest daughter).


Every story has two sides.

But.

I’ve heard enough first-hand stories from families with special needs about churches who have rejected them.

I’m not talking about stories like “well, they just weren’t sure what to do with us.”

No, I’m talking about conversations like the one I had with one of our moms after respite, when she, with tears in her eyes, told me, “We love the church. My dad is a pastor. But we don’t go to church anymore, because our last church asked us to leave.”

Please take a moment to process that before you move on. Take a moment to consider how you’d feel if you were asked to leave the church because of your eye color or skin tone or height or IQ or some other attribute you can’t control. This child wasn't aggressive or dangerous; they were asked to leave because the children's ministry leaders said his autism was too distracting.

If I were writing about a church that kicked out a family because their son was black, we’d be outraged. But sometimes when I share the stories I hear from the families we serve in Access, someone responds, “well, you can't really fault the church. They probably just didn’t know how to handle it.”

Maybe it’s because I’m dosed up on enough prednisone to work me into a bit more of a ranty state than usual (and to allow my asthmatic lungs to work), but let me tell you what I think of that sort of response: it’s baloney. When church leaders kick out kids who aren’t up to the general education expectations they are used to, they don’t need our excuses.

 They do need grace. And repentance. And yes, training. And prayer.

 When I see tweets like this one (related to this story)


three prayers come to mind:

Jesus, help this family. 

Jesus, let this church learn from this situation, even if the facts being reported aren’t completely accurate. 

 Jesus, please come soon. 

  Amen.

you're our people. thank you.

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Yesterday was a hard day.

If you're wondering why, read yesterday morning's post at The Works of God Displayed.
And then read my tweet from last night:

Yep, brutal + beautiful = brutiful.

But?

It was also a good day.

Why's that?

Well, this happened.


Every day, I've been sharing an Upsee giveaway post from my friend Ellen at Love That Max, because each day's share = one more entry in the giveaway. The giveaway is still open for entries, so that's not how the picture above happened.

 (Though if we do win one that way, I already know which friend of mine would be blessed by receiving it.)

But, speaking of the giveaway, I got all teary as I read the comments on the giveaway yesterday, as a dozen or so friends have entered on Zoe's behalf with comments like these:












Y'all rock.

Then yesterday morning, as I was in tears missing a sweet boy who didn't get to turn 8 this year, friends from college sent me a precious message asking if we would be open to their buying an Upsee for Zoe.

Be still, my heart.

 In January, I wrote about my word for the year: receive. In that post, I confessed that I'm comfortable with giving but I find it hard to receive. But, as we parent six little ones with three special needs and trauma-filled baggage, we can't do it on our own.

We're not meant to.

We're created for community.

And our community? It is the richest.

Back in March, I wrote about a conference I was going to, a conference of "my people." And while those adoption mamas do understand me on a different level than some of you who haven't walked that road, I have to say this: you, if you're reading this and caring about our lives, you're our people too.

We love you.
We need you.
We're so blessed by you.

Some people have called us heroes, but really? You're our heroes.
We couldn't walk this road of faith without you.
Thank you.

 It was still a hard day.

But it was a good day too.

Stay tuned to see our Zoe rocking her Upsee once it arrives!

"Taking on" people with disabilities? A lesson from last week's DWTS

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My big girls love dancing. With six little ones, I can tend toward focusing on the littler ones, particularly since they have some special needs that require a little more attention. So...

We have special Dancing With the Stars time on Tuesday nights. 

 Yes, I know it airs on Mondays, but we watch it via Hulu Plus, which also allows me to check the interwebs on Tuesday so I know if I'll need to have fast-forward handy, like I did the first week to skip exposing my seven year old daughters to Jason Derulo's performance of Talk Dirty to Me.

{Catchy, yes. Appropriate, no.}

We fell behind last week, so this week found us finishing last week's show on Monday night.
If you're not a DWTS fan, which I haven't been before this season, let me fill you in on the disability element this time around: Amy Purdy is a double amputee, a bronze medalist in snowboarding in the 2014 Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi, an actress, a non-profit founder, and a reality TV star, including a stint on Amazing Grace and her role in this season's DWTS.

She's fantastic. She's open about her story and her amputations, including cracking jokes in Week 2 about the risk of her legs flying off during their swing dance and devoting her Week 3 dance to the way her father supported her through her bout with meningitis, including giving her a kidney as she recovered. I was a little worried, though.

When a person with a disability enters a competition full of people who are defined as "typical" by this world, one of two things tends to happen:

  1. the person is there as a filler for ratings/diversity/publicity with no intention of accommodating her in meaningful ways to allow her to compete (which, thankfully, has not happened), or
  2. the disability is presented so centrally that the person is secondary, either through explicit focus on the disability or implicit focus by constant discussion of how inspiring she is, bringing the focus to the disability, while the discussion about the other competitors is focused on their dancing, which is what the show is about. 

While the inspiration storyline has definitely been there, the judges have been focusing - especially last week and this week - on Amy's dancing skills.

But.

One comment last week from Erin Andrews made me cringe in a big way, though.

At about 7:45 in the video below, the host Erin asked Mark, Amy's partner, "What kind of pressure was this for you, taking her on?"



I know what she meant. I do. The pro dancer has to choreograph the dance and train the star to do it, and Mark has never done either for a dancer with two prosthetic legs. And I love Erin, dating back to the days when I hung out with her little sister at their house in our hometown of Brandon, Florida.

And?
I love Mark's answer, the way he brings it back to Amy's skills and the competition rather than her disability.

But we can all learn from this, because most of the time in the church, we don't mean to offend. Erin didn't mean to offend. What she did, though, was reduce Amy to an object or at least a lesser competitor. Her words would have been called out if she talked about the pressure of "taking her on" as a partner for any other star competing on the show. But when it's someone with a disability, is it any more acceptable to minimize their personhood?

Nope.

When you interact with people with disabilities at your church, do they feel like equal members in the body of Christ or like a service project you're "taking on" out of pity or obligation or something other than friendship? When you talk with special needs parents, are you thinking about meaningfully including their child or "taking her on" as another task on your to do list? When you consider families like mine in which four of our children were adopted, some with special needs, do you see children we love or diagnoses we took on?

(I sure hope you see the children we love, first and foremost!)

I'm thankful for my role as a special needs ministry leader and a special needs mama. It's not something I take on.

It's something I'm blessed to get to do.



three reasons why this blog has been quiet for the past two years

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reason 1: i became a special needs mom

Back when I started this blog, I was a mom and a disability ministry leader and a former special ed teacher... but I had the luxury of choosing the special needs world. When you choose to enter that world, you can also choose to leave. It's more of a visit. Perhaps it's a long-term visit, but it's a visit nonetheless.

For families who live with significant, life-impacting disabilities, they don't just visit the special needs world. It's their permanent residence. 

When we adopted our youngest child, who has cerebral palsy, I became a special needs mom. The change from being a visitor to being a resident of special needs world made me lose my voice for a bit. As a visitor, I knew how I wrote, encouraged, prodded, and exhorted the church to throw open the door to people of all abilities. Something shifted with our Zoe's arrival, and I didn't know where I fit for a time.

Then the shift became more pronounced when our Robbie had his first seizure, ushering us into an unexpected diagnosis of epilepsy and fixing us firmly in special needs world.

I didn't feel like I fit any longer with the special needs ministry leaders whose lives weren't directly affected by disability, because now mine was. But I didn't feel like I fit with the other leaders, because I was about five minutes into the life that they had walked for months or years or decades or more. 

Instead of just sharing what God was doing in our lives, I thought I had to fit one of two molds. I was wrong, but my mistake held my tongue for a while.

reason 2: i was caught up with a different God-led adventure

My husband and I always planned to adopt someday. 

We thought someday would be around 2014ish. 

Someday turned out to be two special needs adoptions much sooner than planned, one child in 2012 and three more in 2013. Our family blog shares a lot more about those stories, but suffice it to say that God's plan was immeasurably better than the one we had.

But the time involved in His glorious plan meant less time spent writing here, a trade-off I'd gladly make all over again.

reason 3: i was grieving 

Christian died one year ago today. 

He was 7.

My two oldest children are 7 this year, and today I'm thinking of them and thinking of him. I'd like to say something mature about this being his heaven-iversary or something that reiterates the post I shared about Christian one year ago. But you know what? I'm going to say something honest instead: I'm mad that I got to see my girls turn 7 but I didn't get to see Christian turn 8. 

Grief is hard.

Somehow, I miss Christian more now than I did last year. 

I miss him every time I do the laundry, washing shirts that used to be his. I miss him every time I help my boys pick out clothes, because they often wear outfits I remember on him. His mama - a dear friend - blessed us with the gift of the clothes I wish her son was wearing instead of mine. 

Sometimes grief just takes the words away for a time. 


Those are three reasons this blog was quiet for a time...

...but they are also three reasons why this blog is back, with 30 posts already scheduled and more to come. I'm even more passionate about special needs ministry than I was when I last posted regularly, because:
  1. I'm a special needs mom now, so it's more personal.
  2. Our adoptions have made us much more familiar with the special needs of foster and adoptive families in churches around this country.
  3. Special needs ministry involves grief sometimes. And we all need each other to walk through that and other hard stuff.
If you're reading this, then you didn't give up on me in the quiet times. Thank you for that.

And thank you for joining me in a conversation worth having. 


six months ago today, this happened

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We landed in Uganda, after something like 32 hours of travel.

We packed ourselves and our stuff into a Land Rover that was too small for all of us.

We rode straight to the orphanage to bring three precious and scared little ones out of its gates for good.





Oh, Jesus. I could write a book on all the changes we've seen in them in the past six months. For example, our sweet Patu is 15 pounds heavier, 9 inches taller, and 3 shoe sizes bigger now than she was then.


But as much as they have changed,
as much as they have grown,
as much as they have learned,


I'm the one most changed.
I'm the one most blessed.
I'm the lucky one.

I get to be their mama.


 Thankful.
~+~
I know some of you bloggy friends will be at CAFO 2014 in a few weeks.
If you'll be there, please comment and let me know. 
I'd love to meet up in Chicago!