I’m clearning out the office to make way for a new project, a book to help volunteer first responders safely aid persons with disabilities. Got my ISBN and bar code and the book will be out soon by Ramps’nthings Press. Look for QUICK LOOK FOR VOLUNTEER EMERGENCY RESPONDERS. If you’re not a responder, you should get it anyway to help your comfort zone, and your church and CERT group will surely need it. We all think emergencies don’t happen to us. but they do.

Cleaning involved sorting and throwing away 50 years (count them!!! I may  be old!) of materials I wrote for teaching workshops of many kinds. Things like how to use music in Christian education, teaching practices, teaching children with disabilites in mainstream classrooms, the use of drama in teaching, and my then specialty, how to work with middle school students — the list goes on. It was like a walk in time as I remembered where I taught it and some of the great people who attended my  classes across the country. It was also a walk in time through educational practices and the terminology we use. Progress has brought us in full circle as  in my church where the children’s groups are converting from rotation system to the contained classroom with team teaching. In nomenclature, we have gone from saying “disabilities” (My book, YOU CAN DO IT, HOW TO TEACH PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES) in the seventies to “special needs” in the nineties and now we are back to saying disabilities.  All of this is about intentions: How do we help them learn about and experience God and how do we call it a comfortable name.

This file and box cleaning included throwing out three big boxes of the Texas Methodist Conference job I did for so long, some of which I kept for reference. All you guys who worked with me on that, I will say, “We made a slow but radical difference!”