Embracing: Beyond Welcoming

Embracing: Beyond Welcoming
Janice Ho

How do we create a lasting impact when we truly celebrate diversity within our community?

It takes more than a quick “hello” at the entrance of a community gathering or church service. The true essence of inclusion moves beyond mere welcoming and into active embracing.

As a foreigner in a new country, I’ve had to ponder what inclusion truly means for my family living here in Lebanon. I desire for us to feel a genuine sense of belonging—to be part of a community that loves us when we are present and misses us when we are not.

A Counter-Cultural Embrace

Now, let’s consider a family navigating life with special needs. Special needs can occur in one or more family members within the same family. Their common narrative often centers on being excluded or forgotten. Therefore, when we choose to include a family with special needs, we must be counter-cultural.

Embracing them means:

• Acknowledging their confusion and laments about a diagnosis and the loss of certain dreams.
• Accompanying them to hospital appointments or assisting in seeking financial aid, simply dropping off hot meals for the week, where possible.
• Supporting them through shifts in family dynamics, rejoicing and crying with them.

Embracing a family with special needs is certainly no easy task, and it is wise to recognize the gravity of starting a dedicated support service. Yet, I must highlight the deeply profound impact that serving individuals and families with special needs can have on our own hearts. It is an immense blessing our church or community center can offer if we choose to embark on this humbling journey of embracing them. We need people with special needs and their families to be part of our world so that we become better, more mature human beings.

“There’s too much we don’t know. Where do we start?”

Here are some suggestions to consider when you plan a special needs initiative:

1. Acknowledge and Confess Blind Spots

We must acknowledge the ways we have not been welcoming to people with special needs and their families in the past. I confess that prior to studying Occupational Therapy, I had never truly noticed these families. I was blind to their reality and had contributed to disabling people with special needs simply through my lack of awareness. Our hearts must confront our own blindness before we can be open to learning new ways of loving and supporting these families.

2. Cultivate a Desire to Serve

Because of the weight of this service, we will need a dedicated team. Pray for a keen motivation to serve and for co-laborers who share the heartbeat of inclusion. A dedicated team will be essential to sustain the effort required to genuinely embrace families with special needs.

3. Build Awareness and Connection

We can help members of our community build awareness of special needs both within the church and beyond. Seek out individuals with special needs and spend time with them. Hear their stories: their struggles, their perseverance, and their ideas for how they see the community loving them. Ask them how they can be a light to others.

These stories don’t always need to be tales of triumph. More often, stories of continued struggle help people connect more deeply, validating their painful experiences. Start giving examples of the lives of persons with special needs in your conversations and talks, gather and share personal testimonies, and read books on families with special needs (e.g., “Call me by name” by Leow Wen Pin and Anne Wong-Png).

4. Seek Training and Education

Finally, commit to attending training and courses to learn more about special needs. SKILD, in collaboration with NDU, conducts regular courses that educate participants on strategies to support persons with special needs. (You can find out more about these courses at: https://skild-edu.org/about-the-course/

What Does Inclusion Look Like? (An Example)

I once visited a church in Singapore that hosts a fully inclusive service for persons with autism, alongside neurotypical individuals and their families.

What made the service different was that persons with autism were allowed to move around. Crucially, all members genuinely cared for them, making it impossible for a visitor to pinpoint which families had a member with autism.

The common concern is, “Wouldn’t it be distracting if people with special needs walk around during the service?”

The answer is education. The entire congregation was educated on proper behavior, communication etiquette, and what special needs entail. Each week, a small piece of information on autism was included in the weekly bulletin. While three or so people might be walking around or making vocalizations, your mind quickly learns to tune these additional movements and sounds out.

What makes this community special is that the essence of inclusion is visible in the hearts of the congregation: the thoughtful manner and tone used to speak with each other, and the quick kindness shown when there was a minor spill or accident. If a person with autism became overstimulated, a volunteer would calmly bring noise-canceling headphones or take them outside for a walk. These volunteers were not specialists by profession, but they loved the families enough to learn the simple strategies and equipment each person required. This is what embracing means: sharing your personal space, especially in a sacred setting. (You can find out more about this church at: https://www.cch.org.sg/)

Our hearts must confront our own blindness before we can be open to learning new ways of loving and supporting these families.

The Transformative Impact

I am not proposing another service simply to create more work for leaders. Rather, I am proposing that we learn not to be afraid of sitting with someone who is experiencing pain and suffering. We must hold space for them, allowing them to cry, question, lament, and ultimately find a path toward healing.

We can all embrace and love people with special needs and their families in practical ways. And you will discover that by doing so, your own hearts will be transformed.