Michele Gyselinck

 Some time ago I watched an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in which he talked about voting and how some states make it extremely difficult for black people to vote with the Voter I.D. laws they have passed in which those poor people NEVER have the proper documents to be eligible to vote, so I'd suggest that in some states being black is a disability that the state government makes no attempt to help.  If anything they deliberately complicate the voting process for coloured people. You might want to watch this episode just to see the hypocrisy of the politicians who pass this sort of legislation.  You can find it on Youtube.

  I watch a service by the People's Church in Toronto when I can't make it to church, and when I see this service on TV, the congregation is NEVER SINGING but only members of the praise team.  If we use the approach that worship is only what's going on up front, then that is borrowed from another tradition, which I hate, by the way, because those singers put on a performance with tremolos in their voices as if they were giving a paying concert or something.  It turns me off no end.  The sermons are good, but the rest must make ordinary congregation members or even people with more limitations so inadequate.  I would not feel welcome in such a church that doesn't consider its people's input good enough to be broadcast on the air.

 It's difficult for Canadians NOT to be aware of Presidential election campaigns south of the border.  When you're a mouse in bed with an elephant, as PM Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the late father of our present prime minister, used to say; you have to always be aware of what the elephant is going to do next.  But since I can't vote in that election there isn't much point in sending that letter.

 When our congregation decided to build an elevator--ramps would have been even more costly because we would have needed one for outside, which was the easy part, and one for inside--we already had people in our congregation who were suffering from arthritis for whom climbing stairs was painful.  It has proved to be a long-lasting investment even though we got the cheapest model available, or almost, and many men from the congregation did as much of the work as possible that did not require technical expertise.  That is one way churches can cut down on expenses.

 True.  But when people talk about independence, I don't think that's what they mean.  What the founders of your country meant by independence was that as a country the U.S.A. could make its own decisions without needing permission from the King of England, nor would it have to pay taxes to another country for its goods.  Of course, we are all interdependent, and that is good and healthy, but the independence of nations from colonial regimes is another story.

 Not me personally, but my mom did at one municipal election.  She has angina, which is a form of heart disease, and she went to vote at an advance polling station that required a lot of walking one year, and when she got to the desk to vote she complained about having to walk all that distance, and the person in charge said she was taking note of the complaint.  You see, a lot of the accommodations when they are made, are almost always only in terms of wheelchair-bound people, who are assumed to be able to wheel themselves around to any distance as long as they don't have to overcome the hurdle of steps or stairs, but people who have heart problems often find walking long distances very hard because they get out of breath easily.  And that day, when my mom got back to the car after voting, she told my dad not to bother because it was too far, and he had even more difficulty walking than my mom. I can't think of the proper term right now but it has to do with the heart not pumping hard enough and fluid accumulating on the lungs.  In Canada, we don't vote for everything at once.  Federal, provincial and municipal elections are held separately, and municipal elections are governed by provincial laws, so they vary from one province to another.  Then we also have to vote for school-board officials. However, we don't vote for judges or sheriffs or any law-enforcing officials.  Judges are appointed by governments; police officers have to do a three-year professional junior college program (in Québec) after which they go to a police academy and are picked by municipal or provincial police corps upon graduation from said academy.

 But what I want to emphasize here is that not all disabilities require the same accommodations, and what works for people in wheelchairs is not necessarily good for people with heart or respiratory problems.  It's NOT a one size fits all. 

 For me this is not an issue at all, and I'm not aware that it is for our congregation either because the topic has never come up in congregational meetings that I can remember.  I've never heard anyone complain that they could not dedicate their babies.  What I have heard, however, is our former pastor saying that people who had been baptised in the Roman Catholic Church as infants asking if they could be baptised again because their first baptism meant nothing to them, and they were not sure of the faith of the priest who baptised them as babies, and he had to turn them away because he did not have the permission to do it.  That we hear about here in Québec.  But dedication...?  Not really.

 Oh, and by the way there will be two articles in the Spring issue of SZMAGAZINE due to appear on April 4th that I wrote. They only publish online now, but you can get a subscription for $50.00 that will allow you to print as many copies as you want.  These subscriptions are mostly for organizations since they usually have the funds to afford that. One of them was already published on the CRC Network. 

  That's nice, but for my part I look forward to not hearing voices anymore, and the problem with them is that you can hear them whether your hearing is good or not since they are a product of the brain and not something that comes from the outslde.  I have a hearing impairment also but the only reason my voices no longer plague me as they used to is because I take medications to control them.  For me heaven will mean being rid of schizophrenia for good.  If you identify with your handicap to the point that you can't imagine being freed of it at the resurrection fine and dandy, but personally I can't wait to leave that in the grave.  Or better yet, on my deathbed.