Disability Awareness Sunday

News from Pastor Hues

Disability Awareness Sunday

This coming Sunday is Disability Awareness Sunday where we welcome and prayerfully consider our friends, family, brothers, and sisters who are differently abled. It encourages each of us as followers of Jesus to consider those who live with a disability and evaluate our openness. How welcoming are we really to those who live with disabilities? How might our worship and fellowship spaces better serve them? It’s important to recognize that our differently abled members and visitors may have different needs, but also have a unique gift to share in the body of Christ.  

Recognizing this unique gift is essential to us living in community with those among us who are differently abled. Scripture even speaks to this. Jesus and his disciples encounter a man born blind and his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” This is a totally normal response from someone steeped within the Hebrew worldview in the first century. This man or his parents must have sinned awfully that he should be unable to see. But Jesus answers in a surprising and hopeful way. Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the glory of God might be displayed in him.” 

Jesus turns the disciple's limited paradigm upside down. Imagine, this man was born blind so that the glory of God might be displayed in him. 

Have we considered our differently abled brothers and sisters in the same light? Have we opened our eyes to the glory of God revealed through them? Do we recognize that they too have been given gifts and abilities just like those of us who are not considered differently abled? 

Ultimately though, we are all differently abled. We are one body with many parts. Each part cannot function without the other. That includes the differently abled among us. 

This is what this Sunday is all about. Recognizing that there is beauty in our differences and that God’s glory can be revealed through whom he wishes to reveal it. 

Join us at 9:30 am for a discussion panel on disability awareness featuring: Pastor Bruce Strade, Patricia Kepler (Special guest), Monica Fuerstenau (Bethesda), & Kelsey Guckenberger (L’Arche Portland). It promises to be an informative discussion to increase our own awareness about people with disabilities and how we might better share life with them. 

Worship will take place at 11am with Bruce Strade delivering the homily and Patricia Kepler sharing a Kairos Moment. 

Don’t miss it! 

Also, don’t forget about the Voter’s Meeting following worship! 

Until Sunday, 

Pastor Dan Hues