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(ABP) — My 24-year-old son is a certified nursing assistant who provides care for three children — two with intellectual disabilities — four nights a week while their single mother is at work.
One “benefit” of such a noble-sounding but low-paying job is that he cannot afford a place of his own and lives at home. For that reason, I happened to be in the loop last Halloween, when he was helping take the kids trick-or-treating and suggested he bring them by our home.
We had heard a lot about the family, so we invited them in to get acquainted. Somewhere along the line — assuming they already had plans with relatives — I invited them back for Thanksgiving. The mom jumped at the offer. (I gather people with autism don’t get invited many places.) It went well enough that we had them back for Christmas and again this past Easter.
Recently, I shared the story with Kathleen Deyer Bolduc, a nationally recognized expert in the area of ministry to people with disabilities and author of Autism & Alleluias, a book that relates spiritual lessons learned from parenting her 24-year-old son, who suffers from autism, intellectual disabilities and an anxiety disorder.
“It is amazing how meeting one or two people with any kind of disability totally shatters our preconceptions and fears,” she commented.
She said she had a similar experience when her sister-in-law brought one adult with autism and another with Down syndrome to her home for Thanksgiving. That was in the 1980s, before Bolduc’s son was born, and she often thinks God brought them to her and her husband to prepare them for life with Joel.
Not everyone has the expertise or ability to do something significant about a problem as big as helping families deal with disabilities, she said, but “anybody can be a friend.”
Bolduc says that’s what she tells people when she’s speaking at inclusion conferences. “You don’t need to sign on for something big,” she said. “Just invite someone for dinner or a movie or to go bowling.”
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
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