For all of the summertime junkies… here is your fix.

Sleeping Beauty just before she woke up on Wednesday
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We’re back for another addition of the Friday Foto Fix. Mostly therapy pictures & photos with mami & papi this week.

Don’t you wish you could count sitting as exercise?
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Photo from our end-of-the year Scripture conference at Campus by the Sea
I’ve posted my most current ministry update - you can read it here. It has a recap of our summer conference, as well as my ministry trip to Turkey.

P.S. If you didn’t get the chance, I also posted a full-update last month about Isabel’s development.

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Don’t worry. She hasn’t gone on vacation for the summer.

Working hard on her core muscles in a supported sitting posture
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In the Sunday LA Times Opinion, there was a commentary - Keep adoption assistance - about some possible changes (read: reductions) to the assistance for families with special needs adoptions.

Of course, money isn’t the reason parents adopt. And for children who require around-the-clock care for medical conditions such as seizures or routine needs such as bathing, even the highest rate may not cover all expenses, particularly if a parent stops working full time. Still, the loss of aid money could make families think twice about adopting children with the most severe disabilities.

I wish that weren’t true, but considering how many children wait for adoptive families, reducing anything that provides assistance for the most vulnerable is sad.

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I was recently re-reminded about the StrengthsQuest material that I had been introduced to a few years back. It is some great material for thinking about personal and professional development. The StrengthsQuest™ or the Clifton StrengthsFinder,

measures 34 themes of talent determined by The Gallup Organization as those that most consistently predict outstanding performance. The greater the presence of a theme of talent within a person, the more likely that person is to spontaneously exhibit those talents in day-to-day behaviors.

Focusing on natural talents helps people build them into strengths, and enjoy personal, academic, and career success through consistent, near-perfect performance.

For me (more…)

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I’m packed up and ready to take off tomorrow morning - en la madrugada - flying to Germany and then I land back in LA-land in the afternoon. I’m not sure how long I’ll be jet-lagged, though I’m usually pretty easily “deceived” by whatever time my watch says. I’ll let you know next week, as well as having a final round-up of my trip.

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Now that I’m here - and figured out a little more about the specifics parameters of what I can share - the vow of secrecy is lifted a little. I’m writing from Turkey, in a city near the Aegean Sea. After flying through Munich on a trip that started Thursday afternoon and concluded Friday at midnight, we arrived safe and sound. (One of my travelling companions still bemoans how we lost a whole day of our lives in travel.)

After getting adjusted to the 10 hour time change, yesterday we took a walk around the city. It so many ways, it reminds me a lot of walking around (more…)

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No, I’m not parachuting into Bagdad. But I am leaving today to visit a student ministry we’ve built a partnership in a Muslim country in the mid-east. While I’m gone, I’d appreciate your prayers:
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An example of the brain from a CT scan (not Isa’s)
I know that it is a weird kind of “anniversary” to mark, but it was one year ago today that a CT scan revealed that our daughter Isabel had experienced a significant brain injury from a prenatal stroke. The past year has been full of many subsequent discoveries - about Isa, her special needs, about the special needs world in general, about ourselves as a family, and about God. What follows is a bit of a recap. (more…)

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Since I was a kid, my dad has had a dream of buying a boat. On weekend visits, we used to spend afternoon after afternoon walking around docks and piers, just looking at different boats. It was my dad’s form of window shopping, though as a young child and later as a teenage, it made no sense to me. All the looking and walking and talking and dreaming… and never a boat to show for it.Well, much to my surprise (and not after a little bit of teasing about the boat-searching fantasy), my dad actually bought a boat! He actually bought it. Her name is “Queenie.” (See the picture above).  The plan is to fill her up with grandkids and enjoy Washington summers on the water.

The fantasy side of boat hunting, however, hasn’t worn off - he described this boat as just “the first of the fleet.” Some dreams die hard. In any case, when I get over the shock, I’ll record this in my journal as a historic day.

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I came across this blog a few days ago from a parent of a 14 year old boy with cerebral palsy. Maybe its like being in a secret society, but I can relate to a lot of what he writes about, even though I know little about the specifics of his situation, and he knows nothing of mine. For example, he writes:

“Ok, if you’re a parent of a special needs child you’ve heard it. Maybe from an older lady at church; or maybe in the grocery store; “you must be special people for God to give you this child”. Oh barf! All I want to do is scream (or maybe even kick that person in the shin).

I am not special; I would gladly let someone else be special. I have no special gift that helps me cope with the fact that I have a special needs child. I am a parent, not unique, but in a unique situation.

Some days I don’t feel like I can make it. I fight with my wife, I yell at my children… I guess that makes me a caring parent, not a special parent. So don’t tell me I’m special. Just tell me to hang in there.”

In a later post he adds:

“I sometimes struggle with the fact that people I would consider ‘complete dorks’ have perfectly healthy children. Why do they get a pass when I have to ‘go through the valley’? “They don’t deserve healthy children”, I say to myself.

I ask myself, “would I have a heart for children with special needs if I didn’t have one myself?” “Would my child be as spiritual and intelligent if he had been born without CP?” Good questions! I believe things happen for a reason. The problem is we don’t always get to see the reason. But the best part for me is that God has allowed me to see some of the reasons why. I feel blessed to see just a glimpse.”

I may be reading his blog, but he is reading my mind…

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Don’t worry - Isa doesn’t believe in summer vacation. So she’ll be here all summer long.

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Last week - as we studied the middle section of Mark’s Gospel at our end-of-the-year summer confernce for CSULA - I taught the section in Mark 10:1-16 about divorce. In preping the passage, I did some research about divorce in the U.S. (see below).

But one stat hit closer to home than the rest - the 75-85% of parents of special needs children that divorce - took on a whole new dimension while at Catalina with my students.

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Since I was out-of-town on Friday, we’ll just go with this.

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After a small absence, she’s back… and showing some leg!!!
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…apparently is time for blogging. This past few weeks my plate has been pretty full. In addition to an ongoing contest with sleep that Isabel has been having, I’ve just had a lot of deadlines and teaching assignments to prep.

In mid-May, I taught a seminar at the Urban Youth Worker’s Institute on the faith transition to college. You’d think that would have been easy to prep, considering that is what I do for a living. But it was challenging to prep because I didn’t want it to just be an information download. Plus, I wanted to challenge some of the common notions that college is only a faith killer. Did you know that for all of the hype about how between 50-70% of college students lose their faith, the number is even higher for their same-age peers that don’t go to college? Anyway, leading the seminar was very re-inspiring for me about both the strategic significance for spiritual formation, as well as what I enjoy most about working with college students.

For example, I love (more…)

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Sleeping beauty slept through the night - Psalm 127:2 is real: “for he grants sleep to those he loves.“

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Because our Isa-capturing-device (aka. the camera) has gone from “misplaced” to “lost.” We haven’t been able to find it for 2 weeks now. Hoping to still find it, but hopefully we’ll have the Friday foto fix back next week.

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I resonated with this:

This seems to me to be one of the central dilemmas of being a special-needs advocate right now — how do you make a disability look serious enough for people to want to help, but not so serious that it seems helpless and hopeless? (more…)

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