When Sarah Smith’s family experienced the heartbreaking loss of her young nephew, Oliver, she turned to the shortest verse in Scripture: “Jesus wept.” In this tender reflection, she explores how grief and grace often live side by side—and how even in sorrow, love leaves a legacy.
Sarah Evans shares her experience as a single woman with a disability and invites us to consider how the Church can offer true belonging beyond traditional roles.
What does it mean to truly belong? This reflection explores the Gospel through the lens of adoption, disability, and the Church—inviting us to see the Church as a family where everyone is fully and equally welcomed at the table.
This is not the love of romance stories or Hollywood endings. This is the kind of love that brings you to the end of yourself and then beyond. The kind of love that takes all you’ve got during the day and keeps you up at night. Real. Costly. Love.
It is a long and slow process for me, a well-educated and nondisabled white male, to appreciate and to pay attention to the ways that God is working on the margins. But whether it is in pausing my frantic productivity to gaze for a moment at crisp pin-points of light in the night sky or in turning my attention to a neighbour who does not use words to communicate, I am “Learning how to say ‘Hallelujah’ from the ones who say it right.”
The movie Penguin Bloom is highly refreshing because it opens a window into the physical and emotional pain that is often associated with adjustment to disability [...] Most importantly it shows each member of the family journeying through their own experience of grief related to disability and eventually coming out the other side, not wishing to die but learning to spread their wings and fly with reinvigorated passion for life.
In the act of writing White Picket Fences, Amy Julia points with humility and gentleness to a kind of confession that refuses to only be part of the problem. It is possible to both acknowledge complicity and privilege and to work towards a better, more truthful, future.
I share my story, not because I need to be heard, but because people still haven’t noticed how hard it is for some bodies to be in a church building, or participate in corporate worship services or activities.
Receiving from Jesus means we understand he is inviting us into new rhythms of life that often demand we slow down and genuinely reflect upon what he is up to. In so doing, Jesus is actually revealing the gifts of our Christian discipleship- his kindness and gentleness.
My prayer for all five our children, those with and without autism, is that God would reveal himself in a way that they would understand.
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