CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES AND AUTHENTIC COMMUNITIES

From 2006-2016 I was a columnist for a Canadian Catholic newspaper. In one of my columns, I wrote about children with disabilities and their authentic inclusion within the human community. I received a huge response from families with disabled children and people of goodwill who thanked me for writing it. The grandchildren I referred to are adults now and will have their own children. Maybe their great-grandfather will take them to a playground—except I will be walking. In 2018, God raised me from my electric wheelchair to walk again as an old man, after decades of paralysis. (It's strange: As a young man I needed a wheelchair, as an old man I walk. It should be the other way round)  Below is the column I wrote so many years ago. It was a long way from then to now and I'm happy to say that accessible playgrounds are everywhere.

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It was a beautiful sunny day for a man to be at a playground with his preschool grandchildren. That’s exactly where I was. I took my grandson and granddaughter to a playground at a nearby elementary school; one child sat on my lap while the other stood on the back of my electric wheelchair as we whizzed our way to the playground. 

 

The place was packed with children of various ages having fun at afternoon recess. I had to watch from the safety of the grass because my wheelchair would get bogged down in the soft sand. 

 

“Look at me!” cried my grandson as he hung upside down from the monkey-bars. My wee granddaughter stood at the top of a slide waiting for me to look at her before she slid down laughing. Zoom! It was so good to be alive and breathe in the fresh April air; it was good to feel the sun’s warmth on my back after a long winter. To be surrounded by such childhood joy warmed my heart.  Joie de vivre!

 

Sweet inclusion

 

Something else made my heart soar. I noticed four children with visible disabilities in the middle of playful mayhem. One child had a withered arm, a second had cerebral palsy, a third with Down’s, and a fourth child was deaf.  It was good not to see “program” or “strategy” to include them. It just happened.  The children simply took each other’s differences in stride and played together.  

 

I sensed that what was unfolding before my eyes was the way God wants life to be—and children were leading the way! They didn’t need behavioral psychologists or experts to show them how to include children with disabilities. They just played. I also sensed that adults and experts need the children’s example more than the other way around. We all do.  

 

Some people are very good at ensuring special needs children are a part of their communities and included in normal childhood. The school I just mentioned is a shining example. Integrated schools are valuable vehicles to teach acceptance and inclusion of people with disabilities. The able-bodied children of that particular school seem to have incorporated this important life lesson into their daily lives. 

 

Why are so many adults such slow learners? Why do I still hear resistance to the integration of children with disabilities into public schools?  

 

Dichotomy of the age

 

At the same time as some children with disabilities were frolicking with my grandchildren at the playground, other children were dying at the hands of experts.  That’s the dichotomy of the age.  We can be so enlightened yet so savage toward children with disabilities.

 

Why are eighty percent of pregnancies involving Down’s children aborted? Nearly fifty percent of pregnancies involving babies with spina bifida end in abortion.  Why is that?  Why are pregnancies scrutinized—with a search-and-destroy mindset—for the slightest anatomical or genetic anomaly or imperfection? Disabled newborns are routinely denied nutrition and hydration in hospitals across North America. Why does modern medicine, and bioethics believe severely disabled children are worthless—so worthless they do not deserve life itself?  Tell that to the four children with disabilities I mentioned playing happily in the schoolyard.

 

I have actually heard some people say it’s unfair to bring a profoundly disabled child into the world.  Feminist icon, Betty Frieden, referred to disabled children in utero as “monstrosities.” She was wrong, so utterly, terribly wrong.

 

People are not monstrous, ideas are.  Deformity or disability can cripple a person’s body or cognitive function. But it is ideas, stone-hearted and brutal ideas that cripple human hearts. It is the logic of darkness and ignorance that stunts the development of character and denies any embrace of love and acceptance to the disabled, the handicapped, or the genetically flawed.  That may be the way of the world but it is not the way for followers of Jesus.  Those who have encountered the living Christ know that all humanity is imperfect, yet still loved by God.  God cares about each individual’s development within a larger common good.  

 

Transformation

 

Real inclusion is concerned with the development of each individual as an integral and indispensable part of a community. Authentic communities of concern understand that every person has something to contribute to the common good.  Sometimes that contribution takes the form of simply being present and being welcome.  

 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says this about the common good:

 

“In keeping with the social nature of man, the good of each individual is necessarily related to the common good, which in turn can be defined only in reference to the human person: … By common good is to be understood “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach there fulfillment more fully and more easily.” The common good concerns the life of all.” (Nos. 1905 & 1906)

  

Put another way, it’s liberty within social form and constructs. 

 

We must take care never to judge the worth of another human being! That is not our right. Humanity’s social nature calls each of us to take care never to close the door of loving acceptance of any human life, regardless of their physical or mental state. 

 

Pray for God’s help to transcend beyond self-focus to become other-focused. Seek to understand more than being understood.  Embrace even when your natural inclination is to repel. Be equally concerned about the common good as individual fulfillment.  Do this and you will begin to see, unfolding before your very eyes, the way God wants life to be.  I’m convinced of it.

 

CANADA'S CONSERVATIVE PRAIRIE LION

 

I was going through some old files and came across a note from Canadian Christian conservative icon Ted Byfield. Canadian Senator Paula Simons once called Ted the "godfather of Canada's modern Conservative Movement." Ted Byfield was my friend, as he was to my son and my father. Ted's wife Virginia died in 2014, after 65 years of marriage. It must have been like tearing off a limb. I don’t think he ever recovered from losing her. He responded to my wife's and my condolence card.

 

 

 

The suffering he referred to was me enduring 30 years with aggressive MS. But that fire I went through would pale in comparison to losing my wife, LaRee. We are both 71 and have been married for over 50 years. We are one, just as Ted and Virginia were. Ted's gone now: He died at his home on December 23rd, 2021. He is with Virginia and our Lord, the Creator of love and marriage.

 

In 2022, a biographical book about Ted Byfield’s life, written by Jonathon Van Maren, was published with the title Prairie Lion(available on Amazon here). The inside cover of the book dust jacket says:

 

“For more than half a century, Ted Byfield was one of Canada's
most significant public Christians, and his life's work included the founding of a religious order, the formation of several Christian boarding schools for boys, a series of influential magazines, laying the groundwork for a political movement, writing books, and serving as editor on a magnificent 12 volume history of Christianity, THE CHRISTIANS: Their First Two Thousand Years. He gave voice to western alienation when there were a few others who would, and help create the consensus that resulted in the first Conservative majority government in decades." 

You can purchase one or the 12-volume set here or here.  (My son Dean Pickup was the art director for the series.)

 

Now, nearly three years after his death, an evening to honour Ted Byfield will be held in Edmonton, on September 25, 2024. Speakers include former Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, Albertan Premier Danielle Smith, Canada’s Leader of The Conservative Party and Leader of the Official Opposition in Ottawa, Pierre Poilievre, and a keynote address by Preston Manning.

 

For tickets click here  

 

SHE OPENED A DOOR FOR LOVE AND RICHNESS

 

“And what do you do for a living? I am frequently asked. “Well, umm, … I’m a stay-at-home father with a severely disabled daughter.”  “My, … you must be an amazing man, I could never do what you are doing.” 

Nothing puffs me up more than to be amazing, except with the realization that I am not. However, something is amazing to me. It's amazing to me that I have been blessed with the privilege of caring for my disabled daughter for 29 years.

From the beginning, as new parents, my wife Caroline and I were counseled by professionals to give up our child because a disabled child is a great burden and a huge financial commitment. We were encouraged to place her in the care of professionals so that we could “get on with our lives.”

There were two crucial considerations that we as parents that we think about. First was that healthcare professionals did not have a clue how to care for our child. Within days of Nancy's emergency caesarean birth, exasperated nurses handed our seizuring daughter to us because they were unable to feed or calm her.  It was evident that professionals didn't know any more about what Nancy needed then we knew, as young, inexperienced parents. We learned that after hours of cuddling, Nancy was relaxed enough to breastfeed.

The second consideration was that there were no professionals who could love Nancy like we did. Nancy is the product of love between my wife and myself; she is God's creation. Whatever Nancy was or would become, she was part of us; she was a member of our family. 

As Nancy’s father, my number one responsibility is to love and care for her even though I would be required to make sacrifices. I chose to honor God's instruction in Ephesians 5:28, “Husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies”; because I knew that a strong marriage would equip us to be a strong family. Some days I felt cheated from time with my wife because Nancy's care came first. Other days I felt like a failure when my efforts to calm Nancy seemed useless. 

The love chapter (1 Corinthians 13) speaks about love and I took this command to love my wife, my child and my family seriously. I was reminded, “Love never fails.” Whenever anger welled up in me and my feelings of inadequacy bore down on me, these thoughts renewed my focus: 

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (verses 4-7).

Nancy taught our family a love lesson; We have learned that sacrifice and difficulty are made bearable by faith in Jesus Christ through the practice of love as defined in first Corinthians 13. While Nancy is not able to communicate and is totally dependent on those who love her, she has blessed me immensely. My wife and companion of 35 years passed away two years ago. Nancy continues to live with me and I love and care for her. What I have not achieved in my life because of my devotion to Nancy has been exceeded by blessings I could never have imagined. She truly is God's gift and she has opened the door of love and richness that I could have never imagined. God does all things well!

David P., Alberta Canada

THIS FATHER'S DAY, I REFLECTED ON HEART TRANSPLANT HISTORY

 

My father and I, September 1967

Two months after the photo the photograph above was taken, my dad suffered a massive heart attack that nearly killed him (his heart stopped 3 times and was revived with defibrillators (that was the first time I heard of them). His heart was so badly damaged from earlier angina (he was a pharmacist, we suspected he had been treating his own symptoms with things like nitroglycerin for quite some time). When he had his major heart attack, he was 50 and I was 14. 

For days, his life hung in the balance. On December 3rd 1967, Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant on a South African named Louis Washansky. It was breaking news around world! My father's treating heart specialist told the families with heart patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) that they were not to talk about the heart transplant with them. The doctor said the transplant was premature because anti-rejection drugs weren't ready. He was right. Mr. Washansky died within 18 days of his heart transplant. We were devastated because we had been grasping at a staw of hope for our dying loved ones. Happily, my father did not die and lived another two years, without a transplant.

Dr. Barnard did his second transplant on 3 January 1968, on a dentist named Philip Blaiberg who lived 19 months, dying from heart complications on 17 August 1969. Anti-rejection drugs progressed at lightning speed. Today, anti-rejection drugs and therapies have been perfected. According to the Mayo Clinic, of people who have a heart transplant, half are alive 11 years after transplant surgery. There are about 5,000 heart transplants performed around the world annually.

FROM ASSISTED SUICIDE TO ASSISTED LIVING

New Zealander Claire Freeman was disabled in a car accident at the age of seventeen. She became suicidal. and advocated for legalizing assisted suicide in New Zealand. In Canada, we euphemistically call it "medical assistance in dying" — even if the person is not actually dying. (People used to call it murder.)

Today Claire is happy to be alive. She worked through her external and internal trauma and grief. When it comes to suicide (assisted or otherwise) communities must never acquiesce to people's desire to die when they have sunk beneath the turbulent waves of their circumstances. 

The goal of any civilized society must be to encourage live with dignity and assisted for the despaired or defeated individual find that dignity. Nobody knows what tomorrow may bring, or what's around the next corner of life. It's that way for everybody and has been forever. 

Euthanasia and assisted suicide advocates talk about "death with dignity." Dignity is not bestowed someone by injecting them with a lethal substance. Dying with dignity is the end result of having lived with dignity. Helping someone kill themselves is not dignity it is abandonment and exclusion from the human family—the ultimate exclusion of the tomb.  

People with disabilities (often acquired as adults) need support and a community of concern that lifts their value, even if they have ceased to believe in their own value. We must ensure resources are available to them to overcome their trauma, loss and grief and eventually strike a new course for their lives within their new reality.   

That's what a real community is. That's what a real community does.

MDP

DONALD TRUMP'S TRIAL AND CONVICTION: HARBINGERS OF THINGS TO COME?

 

I think Donald Trump’s conviction will be overturned on appeal—but it won’t happen until after the election. It was part of the Democrat’s nasty strategy to win the election; they were willing to make a mockery of America’s justice system, to achieve it. They had to get rid of the effective and threatening opposition: Donald Trump. 

We saw similar tactics with Vladimir Putin and the recent election in Russia he handily won (see https://www.voanews.com/a/putin-wins-election-with-no-effective-opposition/7531874.html ). You could easily and accurately replace the headline by replacing Putin’s name with Joe Biden. In the abhorrent farcical conviction of Donald Trump, we witnessed, by their actions, that the Democrats do not believe in free and fair elections; they are only concerned about retaining power at any cost and winning the Presidency again in November. 

Exactly one week after Donald Trump was falsely convicted in New York, the free world solemnly observed the 80^th anniversary of D-day.  

I am grieved that the great democracy of America—perhaps the greatest nation to ever exist in the course of history—a nation that raised human rights and liberty to heights that ever existed, … has come to this point: Its long and honoured system of established legal jurisprudence rooted in more than 700 years of Anglo-American Common Law, was betrayed and sullied by Democrats for the sake of political gain to win the November presidential election. They and their liberal media propagandists, like (MSNBC and CNN and others) want to gleefully refer to Donald Trump as a “convicted felon”. In its bluntest terms, the Democrats have betrayed the high ideal of free and fair elections—and democracy itself. 

I believe that the hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers who gave up their lives in the Second World War would be appalled at what America is becoming (also Canada and Britain). America is slowly abandoning the towering and sacred principles that founded it. (The same is true for my nation of Canada.) 

Indeed, things may seem dire, but may I remind you of Winston Churchill’s immortal words on the eve of the Battle of Britain, for which so many Allied soldiers died:

“I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”[1]

 Those who still believe that Western Christian civilization with its laws, traditions, institutions, and mores—that raised human dignity to its greatest heights in history—must prepare to do battle! 

This new battle will not be fought with guns and blood, it will be a war of ideas, fought against moral corruption, pernicious philosophies and ideologies that turned against God and His blessings that America enjoyed for 248 years. America was the city of the hill, as Ronald Reagan so often called it, a beacon of freedom, justice and liberty for the world to see and emulate. 

In 1787, when the American Constitution was being signed, Benjamin Franklin turned toward the President’s chair. Behind it was a painting of a rising sun. He commented to a few members standing near him:

“I have often and often, in the course of the sessions, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looking behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now at length, I have the happiness to know. That it is rising, and not setting.”[2]

It is time, 237 years later, for Americans to look to the President’s chair once again, and decide if the sun is rising or setting on the United States. Who will sit there: Donald Trump or Joe Biden? There are only two choices. I believe that decision will determine whether the sun that rose on sunlit uplands of the United States of America will drag the nation into the abyss of a new Dark Age? 

With all his faults, and there are many, it will be Donald Trump who can avoid the abyss. The Democrats, their useful idiots and propagandists in the liberal media, and establishment élites are leading America toward it a New Dark Age. I believe the future of America looks stark unless She changes course. But change to what? Reach in your pocket, pull out a coin and read it: “In God We Trust”. There lies the answer in all places and all times. 

What shall it be? One nation under God, or one godless nation, as Joe Biden and a Congress dominated by Democrats will make America; the terrible abyss of a New Dark Age is not far away. The city on the hill will fade. America’s beacon of liberty will dim and then extinguish.

 You must decide! I believe the 2024 Presidential election will determine whether the great American experiment will live or die and whether that which America's Founders envisioned will fade into history. The people must decide. 

I believe that if you choose Joe Biden, America is doomed. The Democrats have special agendas they will inflict on the people (think Title IX, support for abortion up to the 9th month, willingness to stack the Supreme Court and return Roe v Wade, to mention just a few). The Democrats are leading the charge to the New Dark Age that Winston Churchill spoke about. At least Donald Trump is open to ideas that will make America great again. The truth will keep marching on be it good or bad. Click here. 

MDP

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[1] “THEIR FINEST HOUR”, International Churchill Society, https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/their-finest-hour/ , accessed from Internet 07 June 2024.

[2] “FRANKLIN ON THE CONSTITUTION, in READINGS IN WORLD HISTORY, ed. Leften S. Stavrianos, Loretta Kreider Andrews, George I. Blanksten, Paul L. Murphy, Lacey Baldwin Smith (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1962), p.258.

SUFFERING AS GOD'S HAMMER AND CHISEL

 The following article was written by Joni Eareckson Tada for a small book HumanLifeMatters published about  20 years ago under the title SURRENDER TO FREEDOM: Devotions For The Hurting Soul. It contained many devotional stories of Christians (and/or their loved ones) who have faced serious disability or illnesses. 

I am considering revising and updating the book, depending on the interest expressed. If you are interested in purchasing the book (all proceeds will help finance the making of my Christian pro-life movie about transcending disability called"TRANSCEND: A Journey Toward Love" return this email and put "Surrender To Freedom" in the subject heading.

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If there's one verse I know by heart sittin’ in this wheelchair, it's 2 Corinthians 8-9, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more about my weaknesses so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

In the early years of my paralysis when I was squirming to be healed, I pleaded with the Lord to take my wheelchair away. To make a long story short, I got the same response as Apostle Paul. My condition remained chronic.

Why would some hardships never go away? You pray and plead until your knees get sore; yet the pinched nerve doesn't heal, multiple sclerosis doesn't halt, the Alzheimer's doesn't regress, the marriage doesn't get better, the job promotion never comes, and the engagement night never arrives. After 47 years in a wheelchair, this is the conclusion I've come to...

The core of God's plan is to rescue us from self-centeredness. Suffering, especially the chronic kind, is God's choice tool to accomplish this. It means the hurting and hammering process won't end until we become completely holy (and there’s no chance of that happening this side of Eternity).

This is why I can accept my paralysis as a chronic condition. When I broke my neck, it wasn't a jigsaw puzzle I had to solve fast nor was it a quick jolt to get me back on track. My spinal cord injury was the beginning of a long, arduous process of becoming more like Christ. There are times I wish it were easier, but I recognize I have a long way to go before I am like Christ, polished and complete in His image.

The good news is God is ready to give me more than enough help from His end. Abundantly more. If grace abounds where sin abounds (as the Bible puts it), then grace must also abound where suffering abounds. God's power more than sustains us through hardships that hang around. God's grace—the desire and the power to do His will—is sufficient. “Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. Make level paths for your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled but healed” (Hebrews 12.12). Health and wholeness, maturity and completeness, will be mine one day. Then, the hammer and chisel will be put away once and for all. The only thing that will be “chronic” is joy.

Joni EarecksonTada