Ministry at Maranatha

This summer, a group of high school students from the Christ Church youth group went up to Maranatha for a week to help with an organization called Joni&Friends that hosts a summer camp for kids with disabilities.

During our training at Joni&Friends, we were told about the five different mindset stages that a person can go through when dealing with people with disabilities. The first is ignorance, then pity, assistance, friendship, and finally: co-laboring. Most first-timers on arrival at Joni&Friends are in one of the first two stages. Ignorance, where they’re not really sure what’s wrong so they try to avoid people with disabilities, and pity, where we pity them for the things they cannot do and look down on them because they’re not fully functional or “normal.” I was definitely in the pity stage when I arrived, but that was soon to change. 

Most kids from our church that went were assigned a camper to work with one-on-one as a buddy for the entire week. They were called short term missionaries, or STM’s. This experience was so amazing and it taught us to see the campers not just as people who can’t do things that we can, but as brothers and sisters in Christ! We realize now that people are more than their disability, and that we shouldn’t just shove them in a box and ignore or even pity them. 

The most meaningful experience of the trip was one of the other STMs telling the rest of us in an STM debrief that her camper, a little boy with autism and behavioral issues, said to her, “If there was a pill I could take that would instantly make me normal, I wouldn’t take it. This is the way God made me and I want to stay the way He made me.” 

The trip was such an amazing experience for all of us, both youth group kids and leaders. It has made us come to realize that God’s kingdom is made stronger through brothers and sisters that God has made a specific way to serve His purposes.