Amy Julia Becker's Blog, page 47
March 14, 2023
A Birthday Gift for You
What can we do to participate in healing?
One year ago today, my book To Be Made Well was released. It’s a book about the nature of healing, the barriers to healing, and our participation in healing.
To celebrate the book birthday, I want to give you something. As I’ve thought even more about healing, I’ve identified seven ways we can participate in the comprehensive personal, spiritual, and social healing God wants to offer us.
So here’s my gift to you…a PDF guide with 7 Healing Practices.
More with Amy Julia:
Book: To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope
What People Are Saying About To Be Made Well GroupsTo Be Made Well at Hope Heals CampIf you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
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March 13, 2023
Celebrate the Book Birthday of To Be Made Well
My friend Kiersten gave me a kintsugi bowl for my birthday last year. My birthday happens to be a few weeks after To Be Made Well came into the world, and the bowl was the perfect gift to celebrate this book birthday too. Kintsugi is a Japanese practice of using melted gold to piece broken pieces of pottery back together. Their broken lines remain visible, but they have become beautiful. The broken pieces come back together to create a purposeful whole again. To Be Made Well is a book about the beauty that comes from being pieced back together, even when the cracks remain visible.
Tomorrow marks the one-year birthday of To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Healing, Wholeness, and Hope entering into the world. To celebrate, I want to give you something (more on that tomorrow!).
I’m so grateful for the thousands of people who have read this book. But it feels like the work is incomplete, and I still want to tell more people that To Be Made Well is available for them in the midst of their personal and communal pain. I want to offer a way to experience healing, to know the beauty of being pieced back together with gold.
Would you help me celebrate today by spreading the word about this book? I would be so honored if you would write a review on Amazon (right now it has 37. Apparently, once there are 50 or more reviews, Amazon will suggest it to more people).
Let’s celebrate To Be Made Well together with honesty, humility, and great hope.
More with Amy Julia:
Book: To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope
What People Are Saying About To Be Made Well GroupsTo Be Made Well at Hope Heals CampIf you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
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March 12, 2023
5-Book Giveaway
Enter for a chance to win all the books in this 5-book giveaway. Go
here
for how to enter. The winner will receive these books:
In Good Time
by Jen Pollock Michel
My Body and Other Crumbling Empires
by Lyndsey Medford
The Gift of the Unexpected
by Jillian Benfield
This Book Won’t Make You Happy
by Niro Feliciano
To Be Made Well
by Amy Julia Becker
This giveaway ends Friday, March 17, at 11:59 pm ET. Shipping to continental US addresses only. Contest is not sponsored or endorsed by Instagram/Meta.
More with Amy Julia:
To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope
To Be Made Well | Lenten Small Group SeriesWhat People Are Saying About To Be Made Well GroupsIf you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
The post 5-Book Giveaway appeared first on Amy Julia Becker.
March 10, 2023
Make Time for Grown-Up Friendships
No one ever told me how important the friends I made in my twenties would be. There’s something about grown-up friendships.
Those were the years when I was enough of a grown-up to know myself a little bit and to gravitate towards people who would both accept me for who I already was and encourage me to grow into the person I was becoming. Those were the years when I didn’t have children and so I still had a lot of time even though it didn’t feel like it. Those were also the years when real life started happening. When death and suffering entered my reality. When the dysfunctions of our childhood homes became more apparent. When we started making decisions about whether we would keep growing spiritually. When we started paying bills and paying rent.
These four women are some of the people who walked with me through the darkest times and my deepest fears. The ones who prayed for me when I couldn’t pray for myself. Who have spoken both the hard truth and the comforting assurance. Who have told me when I needed to apologize. Who have laughed and cried by my side.
We recently had four days together to explore a city and pray and eat and drink and talk and talk some more. As one of us said, it left us so full it was almost uncomfortable, like a feast.
So here’s a gentle nudge to reconnect with your people, wherever they are. To fly across the country and endure the jetlag if that’s what it takes. To get behind on your to-do lists. To miss out on whatever is happening at home. Especially if you are in a time of hardship, the people you need (the people I need) are the ones who can stand with you in the midst of the pain, remember the past with gratitude, and anticipate the future with hope.
More with Amy Julia:
The Importance of Diverse FriendshipsS6 E14 | Lessons for Healing in a World That’s Sick with Lyndsey MedfordInterdependent HealingIf you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
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March 9, 2023
Nonverbal Individuals in the Church
When Penny was first born, an older Christian woman with a child with Down syndrome came to visit. She told me how her church hadn’t wanted to baptize her daughter or allow her to take communion because they weren’t sure she could “confess with her mouth that Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9). Multiple other people have experienced this same type of exclusion. And I suppose within these churches it seems like a sad but necessary adherence to the word of God.
I recently reread Amy Kenny’s My Body is Not a Prayer Request. It both convinced and convicted me all over again that those of us—like me—who grew up in church communities that took individual verses in the Bible seriously need to learn how to also take the whole story of the Bible seriously. We need to employ both critical thinking and imaginative creativity to understand how God’s love continues to flow in and among each of us and all of us.
Kenny expresses a very different take on children and adults who cannot communicate with spoken words. She reflects on Romans 8:26, where Paul describes the Holy Spirit interceding for us “through wordless groans.” She writes,
“These groanings too deep to utter call to mind the communication experience of some folks with intellectual or developmental disabilities.”
She wonders whether
“grunts, groans, and sighs borrow the language of the Spirit . . .”
And she writes,
“Perhaps if we listened to the groans, we might come to understand the Spirit’s messages.”
Kenny takes the biblical description of humans seriously. She places no intellectual or physical criteria upon those created in the image of God. As a result, she’s more able to find a diverse range of people embodying diverse aspects of God’s being. Her reading of the Bible expands God’s love rather than constrains it.
What if we rejected a hyperintellectual reading of the Bible? What if we instead received it as the creative, loving expression of a God who speaks through articulations of devout faith alongside groans and sighs?
More with Amy Julia:
S5 E20 | Disability Belongs in Church with Dr. Amy KennyFree Resource: Books About Disability and TheologyPenny Sharing in Church for DSA MonthIf you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
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March 8, 2023
MAiD and Lives Worth Living
Last week I spent a whole morning trying to write a post to share some thoughts with you on the sharp increase in medically assisted deaths in Canada (known as MAID). I can’t quite figure out why I’m struggling to write about it. I passionately believe that the way western society approaches death and suffering ultimately dehumanizes all of us. I believe we need to change the ways we care for one another rather than legalizing killing one another. I believe these laws discriminate against people with disabilities. I believe people are being killed against their will and against their best interests, especially now that the law has changed to include anyone who is suffering, rather than only those who are terminally ill.
I guess my trouble comes with how much I understand the temptation to think these laws are compassionate. I know how much we wanted to hasten the end of my mother-in-law’s life when she suffered through her final days. I know how desperate people feel. I know that life itself can become an idol. I know how ethics and ideals can harm people doing their best to live their everyday lives.
But I return to the harm of a system in which disabled people are seen as burdens and death care is more accessible than health care. As this essay in Plough states,
“Many reports have emerged of people pursuing MAID because they cannot access the support services they need to live a decent life or because they are pressured to do so by their medical providers.”
The essay is about the failure of the church to protest and speak a prophetic word against the practice. I would argue that the church’s failure comes not only, not even primarily, in the absence of words that oppose euthanasia, but in the absence of care for the people who need companionship, and shelter, and food, and a sense of purpose.
Changing the law is the first step toward protection of vulnerable lives. But even if that happens—and even if it doesn’t—the church can lead our society in what it looks like to honor and value and provide for the lives of the most vulnerable ones among us.
More with Amy Julia:
S6 E14 | Lessons for Healing in a World That’s Sick with Lyndsey MedfordWhat Casual Discrimination Looks LikeYou Can Be the Person Who Makes a DifferenceIf you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
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March 7, 2023
I’m a Denominational Mutt
When it comes to Christianity, I am a denominational mutt.
I was baptized as an infant in an Episcopal church.
I was confirmed as a tween in a Presbyterian one.
I had my first experience of the power of the Spirit of God at Young Life camp, and I worked for FOCUS right out of college. (Young Life and FOCUS are both called para-church organizations because they work outside any particular church and are broadly Christian.)
I was married in a Congregational church.
As an adult, we’ve been members of an Episcopal church, a non-denominational church, and a Covenant Church. We’ve attended a Vineyard church in there as well.
So. I’m a mutt. And I’m really grateful for it.
From all these different traditions, I’ve learned that God doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about getting doctrine or behavior exactly right. God doesn’t seem worried about whether we sing hymns or praise music, what translation of the Bible we read from, or whether or not we baptize infants. God seems willing to show up wherever two or three are gathered. Each of these church spaces where I have participated through the years has held beauty and brokenness. The Spirit of God has been present in every one.
I know there’s all sorts of pain and church hurt out there. And I know God very is present outside church walls. Still, here’s a little encouragement to step towards a community of people who gather to pray and worship and wonder and care for one another and love their neighbors together. As we experience even a little bit of the width and breadth of this institution called the church, we might just begin to imagine the width and breadth and depth and height of the abundant love and grace of God.
More with Amy Julia:
Communion: The Simplicity of Abundant and Generous LoveThe Blessings of a Small ChurchS6 E8 | Christmas, When Church Lets You Down with Bekah McNeelIf you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
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March 5, 2023
Penny’s PATH
Each year, a team of friends, family, educators, and community members gathers to support and encourage Penny as we plan for her future.
This annual meeting is called a PATH. We talk with Penny about what she sees as her accomplishments, strengths, and hopes and dreams for the future. I’ve written about this experience before (go here), so I won’t go into all the details again, but I will highlight a few things that seem important for every parent and educator to consider about every child and their future.
The PATH is a person-centered, assets-based, community-resourced process.
Person-centered:Penny communicates her hopes and dreams for herself. Peter and I chime in by saying that we see her abilities as a writer and a public speaker and that we have dreams for her to learn how to ride a bike. But she speaks for herself, and we seek to honor and support her vision for her life.
Assets-based:We focus on areas of strength and possibility. Much disability work focuses on deficits, areas that need growth, and milestones that haven’t been reached. Instead of asking, “What can’t she do?” a PATH asks, “What can you do? What do you love?” We assume there is a future filled with promise and possibility and take steps towards that future.
Community-resourced:Penny is not alone. We as parents are not alone. We work within a network of support that includes state services, community care through institutions like churches and non-profits, and relationships with neighbors and colleagues and friends.
At the end of each year, we create an action plan with specific, achievable goals. Doing laundry. Cooking one meal a week. Finding a summer job. Penny helps create the plan. And we all participate in small ways in seeing that plan become a reality.
Person-centered. Assets-based. Community-resourced.
And filled with hope.
More with Amy Julia:
inclusion.compacer.org (scroll down to see Resources at the bottom of the link)More about the PATH Proces for PennyPenny Sharing in Church for DSA MonthThe IEP Meeting Every Child With a Disability DeservesIf you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
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March 3, 2023
Holding the Lines as a Parent
I was going to be the parent who holds all the lines.
The no-cell-phones-until-high-school line.
The dresses-that-look-your-age-for-the-middle-school-dance line.
The only-one-sugary-treat-a-day-and-only-a-small-one-at-that line.
And the common-sense-media-tells- me-all-I-need-to-know-about-what-you-should-be-watching-on-television line.
These lines are intended to protect our kids from consumption and materialism and exposure to ideas that are inappropriate. And yet they can feel like lines intended to restrict them from exploration and fun and connection with other people.
So, we gave William a cell phone earlier than planned.
We let Marilee wear a dress to the dance that seemed designed for a 21-year-old.
And you can just imagine what the sugar and television consumption look like around here.
So right now, we are not holding lots of lines. We are talking about our tech use and sharing our screen time reports with the whole family once a week. We’re talking about what we want to put into our bodies and minds. We’re talking about clothing as both a means of self-expression and a way to communicate hospitality to other people.
The problem with holding the lines is when they become means of control and perfectionism. We are definitely making mistakes as parents. And I hope we are making those mistakes in witness to what it looks like to live a life of grace and love.
More with Amy Julia:
Family Dinner QuestionsSkiing, Disability, and LoveWhen One Child Needs More AttentionIf you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
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March 2, 2023
Are People With Disabilities “Less Than” in Leviticus?
I recently opened my Instagram inbox and found a DM from one of you. I love receiving your questions about all sorts of things—parenting, disability, faith. This is one I thought you would all appreciate about disabilities in Leviticus:
Question:
I’m reading Leviticus right now and it’s so disheartening to read chapters about women and especially difficult to read chapter 21 “no one who is blind or lame, or one with a mutilated face or a limb too long… (shall approach the temple).” I know that we are set free from the law in Jesus. But it’s still confusing that this is in the Bible at all… that some of our deep rooted ideas of people who are disabled being less than are written in down in plain sight. Do you have any thoughts around this? Or reading that you recommend?
My Answer:
The language and assumptions around disability in the Bible can be really hard to understand, especially when they seem to be excluding the very people that other parts of the Bible say are incredibly important to God.
The best response to Leviticus 21 I’ve found is in Brian Brock’s book, Disability. Basically, he says that there are two ways people have interpreted these passages. They have either said that these laws are no longer binding or that we should just interpret them allegorically—that they aren’t really about disability of the body but of the soul/heart.
But Brock offers a third way, what he calls a Christological reading in which:
“Jesus ends the quest set out in the law for a blemish-free act of worship. . . He is the perfect priest who fulfills the ceremonial law and does so hanging from a cross. The Jesus who is wounded and broken for us is, in this particular wounding, breaking, and even blinding, perfectly fulfilling the role of the priest of Israel. . . Jesus fulfills the quest for the perfect priest and sacrifice in an impaired and disabled body. In so doing God points forward to a corporate body of Christ that will include all sorts of bodies…”
I find Brock’s reading really compelling and hopeful. It doesn’t explain away the exclusion that people with disabled bodies experienced in the past, but it does make a way forward for us to fully value people in their bodies as they are and to celebrate the diversity of the body of Christ.
More with Amy Julia:
Book: A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny Free Resource: Books About God’s Theology of DisabilityIs John 5 Ableist?If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , YouTube , and Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
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