When you can’t do it all and God brings others alongside…
I’m going to be blogging less. I’ve been struggling to maintain writing this and my autism teaching blog because of other commitments. I have eventually realised that I don’t need to feel so stressed or guilty – that the Lord is taking me on a different path for now. I also have a job which is ministry in itself, the Roofbreakers Network to organise and my educational writing projects. I need to be kinder to myself and take a break now and again, as well as realising God isn’t asking me to do any of this alone. Only in his strength but also with the teams of people he is connecting me with. Thank you Lord!
What’s happening?
- Since I wrote this blog about putting together an “Included by Grace” book that work has been steadily going on in the background. I’ve enlisted my daughter and my dad to help me and we are putting the content together so I can edit it.
- But also there’s another couple of projects starting to take form. One of them is a long held vision I’ve had to share our Bible teaching materials online so people with learning disabilities themselves can access the teaching and people who want to plan for groups like ours can also access that teaching and planning. Well, despite being terrified (of all the things I don’t know) God has brought alongside me people who get it, people who are doing similar things and people who want to help. So our plans to have an accessible Bible teaching website are in the early planning stages but at last seem to be a possibility. One real encouragement recently was to be put in contact with two other women doing something similar. One is doing this for children, one for teenagers. That fits in perfectly with my plans to do this for adults. Thanks to Mark Arnold from Urban Saint’s Additional Needs Ministry for connecting us!
- Finally, it is also a dream to enable the members of our Good News Group to share the gospel with others and we are going to try putting a team together to do assemblies in some of our local special schools. It would be great for our members to be role models for the children in those schools. Again, God is good, I have people who get it, who want to help and even some links with people who have done this before and will share ideas (If you know of anyone else who has done this please ask them to get in touch with me).
All that and it’s the Christmas season so our group is gearing up for it’s annual outreach Christmas service on Wednesday. They are all so excited. And then on the following Wednesday, 5 of the group have been learning a puppet dance to “Celebrate the Child” by Michael Card. I led a workshop about teaching puppets to adults with learning disabilities at the One Way UK European Puppet Festival in October. This is us putting our words into practice… I might write a post about how we did it and what the challenges were another time. I know its going to be fabulous and everyone will enjoy it.
So for blogging…
I hope if you follow my blog you won’t forget about us. I will repost some of my old blogs, especially the practical advice ones and share them on FB and twitter. Includedbygrace now has a FB page if you’d like to follow it. You can comment on there and keep in touch. And I’m on twitter as @includedbygrace And pray. We’d appreciate that a lot.