Joni: Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and welcome to this edition of “Joni and Friends.” I love it when I can get some of my friends in the studio to just talk to them about what is on their heart. Like my friend Barb Shanahan. Welcome Barb.
Barb: Hi, Joni.
Joni: Barb, you and I first met at a Family Retreat, I’m thinking 15 or 20 years ago…
Barb: It was probably 15 years ago at Oakwood Inn.
Joni: That’s right. And your little Emily in her wheelchair with cerebral palsy was only seven years old. You know, I have watched you through the years handle your daughter’s disability and you are a mom and have to overcome some big obstacles. What advice would you give to friends listening who parent a child with a disability and they are just feeling like my child’s world has ended, things will never be the same, I’ll never make this.
Barb: My encouragement is to open God’s word and read that and spend time set apart from the family in prayer. I can remember early on when I was struggling and felt Emily’s world and all my dreams for her were ending. And someone had given me one of your books to read “A Quiet Place in a Crazy World.”
Joni: Really?
Barb: Yes. It just opened my world to all your writings, pointed me back to God’s Word and the importance of prayer, and I just started to get up early in the morning with a cup of coffee before Emily would – like half to an hour early just to be with the Lord, praying to Him and reading His Word.
Joni: And praying for your daughter, no doubt.
Barb: Absolutely. I went so far to start breaking Emily’s world up into emotional, physical, spiritual, relational, educational and recreational needs to just sort of begin to pray over those areas I had no control over, but I knew God did.
Joni: God does have control and those disabilities aren’t accidents when a mother gives birth to a child with a disability like Emily’s cerebral palsy. I have heard you tell that your favorite verse is: “Taste the Lord and see that He is good”.
Barb: Yes, Psalm 34:8a.
Joni: Why that one?
Barb: Well, because I am a very relational, social extravert and early on I was just so devastated with Emily’s disability that I just began to withdraw. It just became too hurtful to go out to church and with my friends because they all had typical pregnancies and typically developing children and it just hurt too much to brush up against the world that I didn’t have and I was just dying inside socially and spiritually because I was isolating myself from the very people that God was placing in my lift to love on me and to encourage me, so I realized that I needed to get back out into society and my friends who had typically developing children helped me to fill in the gap of what Emily was missing because I was in a different world for her disability but yet they balanced her life out socially and recreationally.
Joni: So keep those Christian friends because they are God’s way of helping you taste His goodness.
Barb: Yes, absolutely!
Joni: Well, you know, Barb, like I said we first met at a Joni and Friends Family Retreat. It’s February, we are opening up registrations, families are signing up, but there has to be some mom or dad of a child with a disability thinking, that’s not for me. What would you tell them?
Barb: I would say, sign them up, find a way to get there and go. The Family Retreat coordinators prayerfully assign your family volunteer for the week and ours was Janet Vager from Columbia City, Indiana and talk about a “life-time friend”.
Joni: Friend, if you know someone in your church who is a family member of someone with a disability, we need to get them to a Family Retreat. I think Barb would say the same. So just go to joniandfriends.org, visit my radio page and you can download all the information you need to sign up for our Family Retreats this year. We are holding them all cross the United States and there is one for you in your region, so visit today at joniandfriends.org. Thanks Barb for joining us.
Barb: You’re welcome, Joni!
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