......Walk around five times in the hot sun and clap your hands Hold him tight in your arms and rub the back of his head Place a special hand-crafted blanket ontop of him Give him a bath Pray that you can handle this Jump on the bed with his hands in yours Find a toy that might distract him...... How do you help a child with special needs?
All of these ideas have floated in and out of my mind. Ive tried them all one too many times. Sometimes they work,(praise the Lord!!) other times you just have to sit it out and see if the temper tantrum will resolve itself. I have had the oppurtunity to work with the special needs children at Santuary housing here in Balfate, Colon Honduras for almost two years now! I have worked with a child who had physical disabilties, a child with both mental and physical disabilties and now with a child that suffers with just a mental disorder. There have been plenty of days when I just want to cry out to the Lord and beg him for an answer, "Why did his mom have to pass away? Why did he live so far up in the mountains that he could not recieve the correct medical help? Why didnt anyone want to teach him how to walk? How do I teach him how to walk? Why cant she see, Lord? What does she think or feel? Why is she crying? I just want to help her. What would he say if he could talk? Is he crying because he is hungry or because he is a six year old? Why did you ask me to do this job? Why did you make me fall in love with these lives?" I am not equip for this job. I am not patient, I am not strong, I do not know how to calm this child, I do not know how to help her heal. These are the facts. On the bad days, these things ring through my head and sometimes get me down.I have to remind myself that I am an imperect person, but I serve a perfect God. (quoted from: Iain Mckenzie) That phrase is also a fact, the most important fact that you are going to read in the blog post, maybe in your life. "Why do you keep going?" There are days when it all makes sense, days when all my questions are answered. For example, the day when Elkin (a 14 year old boy who suffers from spina bifida) walked for the very first time on his own after living in his bed for the majority of his life. Or the day when Cindy, (a 13 year old child who suffers from Cerebral Palsy) grabs the side of the couch and stands herself up, eager to walk with the help of someone. Or when Renan, (a 6 year old child who suffers from autism) laughs so hard that he falls down and you cannot believe that God has choosen you to be apart of his life... to be apart of their lives. I have learned so much about our Lord in these past years. He has shown me just how incredibly weak I am and how needy I can be. I remember doing exercise after exercise with Elkin thinking that this was never going to work. He proved me wrong. God knew what he was doing. I always refer to Isaiah 55 when I talk about my life as a missionary because it clearly states that God is higher than I am, his thoughts are greater than my own. Not a single days has gone by where he has not reinforced that verse in my life. Bringing me to Honduras, challenging me with the job of loving those difficult to love, reminding me that I too, am difficult to love. Yes, I may have two functioning legs and I can feed myself, I can talk and I dont have to use a diaper daily, but I am at a greater loss than these children. I am a sinner and I run from God. I fall down and I seek the world even though I know in my heart that He is the way. I look around at these children and realize that I am no different. I am a 22 year old girl living with special needs. My special need is that I need the Lord, I am nothing without him. His grace is what saves me daily, his strength and failthfulness. That is why I keep going, because He has shown me that my love for these children is worthless without him. The work and effort is nothing without him. All of the miracles I have witnessed were done by him and him alone. I may wake up tomorrow and doubt again, think to myself that I have not really seen a difference in Renan, not as fast as I had hoped or that I am at a loss of what to do for Cindy but the one thing that I am sure of is that God is not at a loss for her, he sees the differences in Renan, he sees the difference in me, and I know that he who has started a good work in me will carry it on until the day of Christ Jesus. That is where my hope is found. So I will get up tomorrow and start fresh. I will probably walk around five times in the sun while clapping my hands, and will most likely hold a crying child in my arms trying to comfort him, and I may even cry out to God to help me... but I would not change this job for anything else. Ways you can pray:
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"I have seen you in the Sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. Because your love is greater than life, my lips will glofify you."
Psalm 63: 2-3 NIV Sanctuary House Children's Center - http://www.crstone.org/sanctuary-house/ After a full day of traveling, meeting new faces, feeling in awe of the poverty that now surrounded me, I remember clearly the wave of relief that crashed over me as we pulled into the drive-way of the teenage girl's home, located near Balfate, Honduras. That night was nearly two years ago. As I think back to that night and the following weeks that quickly passed me by, I remember thinking of this new place I was to call, "Home". Sanctuary Housing (or better known as the Children's Center), was something I had only learned about a week earlier; A ministry of Hospital Loma De Luz that took in orphans, needy children and/or children taken in by Governent officials and gives them a place to live, an oppurtunity for education and surrounds them with a community of people that love them and want nothing more than to show them the love of Christ. As I was unpacking my bags in my new bedroom and trying so diligently to understand the teenage girls that were helping me so kindly to place my things in their new places, I was wondering where these girls had come from; who loved them? What kind of hurt have they faced at such young ages? Where were their parents? How long have they been here? Do they remember their first night here? Were they feeling as unprepared as I was? I quickly learned the anwers to most, if not all of these questions. Three months came and went quicker than I would have liked. However, during those three months, I got to learn so much about the Honduran culture, I learned the joy that comes from laguhter at one o'clock in the morning when one of the teenage girls must have eaten too many beans for supper (If you catch my drift) HA! I learned that God can heal and he places his hand directly on our lives and he placed every single one of those teenage girls (and the rest of the children) in the right places at the right times so that they would be able to go to Sanctuary housing and be offered another chance at a childhood and at a life. But one of the main things I learned in that short amount of time was that Sancutary Housing (Children's Center) was going to change me, and I am not talking about the, "I dyed my hair and it is somewhat noticable" kind of change, no. I am talking about a drastic, every thing I have ever thought about life and love, and all the things I held close to me, were going to change and I would no longer be the same version of Alissa Marie Kearney that I was when I first arrived. I was going to be different and this was going to be something to be excited about. SANC * TU * AR * Y (Sanctuary) 1. a place of refuge or safety As I mentioned earlier, the Children's Center is commonly referred to as Sanctuary Housing. As I have continued to live on-site here and have grown to cherish and love all of the children that inhabit it, I have come to an understanding of why it has this name. If you refer to the definition I have posted above, it clearly states that a sanctuary is a place of safety or refuge. That is the goal of the Children's Center, to provide safety and refuge to the children of the Northern coast of Honduras and to create a home-like sanctuary for them. We take in children who are needy, sick or do not have a family that can provide for them and place them into one of three houses ( depending on their ages), and then we place them into school, give them clothes if it is needed, and then we take part in giving them back the childhood that was taken from them. God has given me the oppurtunity to work alongside Iain and Liz McKenzie and to help with the special needs children of Sanctuary housing. During the past two years, I have been blessed to be able to watch how God has placed us all here to make this home available to be a sanctuary for these children, but more so than that, he has blessed me by allowing this home to become my own sanctuary. I feel safety and refuge in the presence of these children. I feel welcomed and loved by the honduran workers that are always challenging me in my education of the Spanish language, and I feel wanted and needed in the home of the Mckenzie's. So going back to the first night when I arrived to the teenage girl's home of Sanctuary housing, and to answer one of the questions that was linguring in my mind , " Did they feel as unprepared as I do on their first night here?", The answer is that they probably did, and they probably were. However, I have no doubt in my mind that God has come in and shown them that this can be a sanctuary for them, that Jesus does reside here, and that He makes all things new. "I am the Lord your God, I go before you now
I stand beside you, I'm all around you Though you feel I'm far away, I'm closer than your breath I am with you, more than you know" Come to me - Bethel These lyrics have been the main theme to my mission throughout the past year and a half. God has sweetly whispered them to me, and then at times it feel as though he was yelling them at me. Both of which he did at just the right times and in just the right ways. When I decided to travel here to Honduras, I was a big ball of emotions of which included; excitement, nervousness, anxiety and anticipation. Now that I have been here for this long, I am still a big ball of emotions, just completely different emotions. Most days I feel tired, but the good kind of tired. The kind of tired you feel when you've spent the entire day running around with children and you've been showered with some many little hugs that you can barely stand straight. The kind of tired when you have been using all the power your brain has to communicate in a language that is not your own. This is the kind of tired I think I could feel my entire life and never want it to end. Other days I feel thankful. Thankful for the sunshine during the day and the cool breeze in the evenings. Thankful for the chance to love the people of this country. Thankful for the way the family that supports me here has folded me into theirs, like I am one of their own. Thankful for the chance to work in the hospital and to learn how to care for wounds and to be able to have relationships with the surrounding communities. Thankful for fellow missionaries and workers that hold me when I am sad and laugh with me when I am joyful. Speaking of joyful, that is the main emotion I have been feeling lately. My joy comes from the Lord and the Lord alone (Psalm 84). He has given me a joy that cannot be shaken. I feel joy in the good times, like when Elkin (in the process of working on a blog post about his story) came back to the children's center and I got to watch how the Lord worked through me in his life and I get to see him walking around and laughing with his friends. I feel joy in the hard times, for example, recently when God called sweet Araon home to his arms. The point is, that even though after a year and a half of serving here, and I am still a big ball of emotions... I am full of emotions that God has placed in me and I get to share them with the most beautiful people I have ever known and get the privilege to continue to do that for the rest of this year and hopefully longer. So when I hear the lyrics that tell me "Though you feel I am far away, I am closer than your breath", I can remember that I am his, and He is mine and that even when tragedy occurs, I can look around and be thankful that I am here and that get to be apart of this work and of this story. I will remember that I am privileged to be able to feel this pain and this hurt, and that his joy comes in the morning. |