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Bulletin Inserts |
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-
- Healing a World
- Our Voices Together
- Sharing
changes lives—including our own.

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Restoring
Hope and Wholeness |
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When
disaster strikes, we look to our church for help. Churches receive both volunteers
and evacuees themselves, and provide space for social services to survivors.
But they are also where we go to mend the damage to our spirits and emotions—a
safe space to gather to try to make sense of our loss and find support and hope.
This spiritual care is an increasingly important dimension of the ministry of
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA).
This ministry is especially difficult—and necessary—when
the church itself
is affected by the disaster. Last May, just as a group of its members was
preparing to leave on a work trip to the Gulf Coast, the Presbyterian Church
in Moscow, Idaho, and the immediate area became the scene of multiple murders.
Seeing their sacred space cordoned off as a crime scene, the Rev. Norman Fowler
shared his congregation’s feeling of violation and organized a prayer vigil
on the church lawn. A few days later, the congregation had a blessing service
in the church to rededicate the sanctuary.
Two members of PDA’s national response team quickly arrived in Moscow. “Their
presence let me step back and process things with them,” recalls Fowler, “helping
me avoid the sense of isolation that comes in situations like that.” The
PDA staff kept in touch to offer resources as needed, including a workshop on “compassion
fatigue” for the staff last October.
Those of the Moscow congregation who went to the Gulf Coast had their own
lessons to learn. “Though many of us felt that leaving our community
at this time was going in the wrong direction,” recalls Mary Read, “we
knew we needed to be where we could make a difference. There was something very
precious about being in relationship with others during their time of healing
when we so strongly felt the need for healing ourselves. And knowing that PDA
was back home helping the people we loved allowed us to go without feeling guilty.
I know it made me feel proud to be Presbyterian.”
Spiritual care is not a separate ministry, but a set of values and skills
based
in Jesus’ call to love one another that inform PDA’s whole ministry.
But at times, it can become the most important part of that ministry. When members
of PDA’s national disaster response team bring a compassionate presence
to members of a community reeling from a disaster, it is our prayers their presence
embodies. Today, let us commission them with our gifts to continue responding
whenever they learn of such needs.
In 2007, gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing also enabled PDA to:
- Train community counselors in Peru and develop a trauma and
emotional recovery curriculum in Sudan;
- Send Gulf Coast pastors and their
spouses to the National Pastors’ Sabbath;
- Offer a spiritual and emotional care program for 50 church
leaders in Lebanon.
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Healing
a World |
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For
decades, deforestation has stripped away many of the plants on Haiti’s
mountains. With nothing to hold it in place, the soil washes away during normal
rainy seasons, and especially during hurricanes. Hillsides can quickly turn into
virtual deserts.
That pattern describes Moccene Joachim’s land before he began working
with Mouvman Peyizan Papaye (MPP), a group of farmers on Haiti’s Central
Plateau. Moccene has worked with the MPP for most of the four years it has been
working with the Presbyterian Hunger Program (PHP). He has learned basic veterinary
skills and through the MPP’s Road to Life yard project is helping his family’s
land heal itself.
A variety of food vines, tree species, and forage grasses now create barriers
that block rushing waters from carrying away the soil; the water that filters
through it is saved for deeper rooted crops even during the dry season. Aside
from creating forage for his goats, whose manure enriches the soil, these barriers
also protect his main cultivation area by the river, where he grows fruits and
vegetables. Moccene grows other vegetables in his yard—in old tires on
tables with his goats and chickens nearby.
Taking seriously MPP’s focus on organizing in small groups, Moccene
has formed twelve family and neighbors into “Tèt Ansanm” (Putting
Our Heads Together). The group’s regular meetings and workdays help members
learn how to produce more food with less work in their own yards.
Even working together, people cannot heal the earth. Only God can do that—and
God’s creation can heal itself if we give it a chance. We can all play
a part in giving it that chance. That may mean planting vines and trees to help
change water from a destructive to a healing force or it may mean finding and
teaching new techniques. Many of us can help by supporting the Presbyterian Hunger
Program with our gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing. Today, let’s put our
heads together with the people of Papaye and other places where a damaged
environment makes survival difficult. Let’s join with them in helping that
groaning creation to heal itself.
- Since 2004, OGHS has supported MPP’s
work, directly benefiting more than 5,000 people like Moccene through the PHP.
- In 2007, the PHP funded 63 international grants totaling
$1,285,383 from OGHS and other contributions.
- The PHP also made 147 domestic grants totaling $1,006,138
and 34 congregation-based community organizing grants totaling $239,000.
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Our Voices Together |
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No
way was Tammy going back to a nursing home! At the one she’d been in before,
she was treated like a problem, not a person. If you complained, there were about
a thousand quiet ways to make you miserable. But when she moved to Salt Lake
City, she didn’t see many choices: Yes, there were personal attendants,
but with twenty-three people ahead of her waiting for one, it could take months.
. . .
After five years, Marjorie had convinced the state she was capable of living
outside a nursing home. But her fiancé, Kevin, was told he was not.
. . .
Getting his badly needed dentures approved took Charlie nine months. Suddenly
his social worker left, and his replacement decided to start the process over.
. . .
Through the Disabled Rights Action Committee (DRAC), a group of disabled individuals
working together and funded by Self-Development of People, these folks found
that they could make bureaucracies listen by holding demonstrations. Suddenly
both Marjorie and Kevin seemed capable of independent living. In no time Charlie
was sitting in a dentist’s chair!
After a protest at the governor’s office, an official came out to say
it would be unfair to put Tammy in line ahead of the others who needed personal
attendants. Agreeing, the protestors suggested the state find funding to support
attendants for them all. Miraculously, they found the funds. Since then, Tammy’s
life has steadily improved. She worked with DRAC on a grant to help others move
out of nursing homes, then went to work with a poverty group. She married a man
without a disability, and they now have two children. For someone deemed incapable
of living outside a nursing home,
she is doing pretty well.
Most disabled individuals have wrestled with the fact that all children of
God depend on each other. Many of the rest of us carry an invisible disability
with us every day: the destructive illusion that we must be self-sufficient.
As we open our hearts to share our resources with others through this Offering,
may their experience help us melt away that isolating illusion.
- Self-Development of People (SDOP) funds community development projects
started by economically poor groups of people who control and benefit from the
projects.
- Fifty-six certified SDOP committees in presbyteries and synods funded
69 projects across the country in 2006.
- SDOP partners with communities of need throughout the United States
and community development projects in about 30 countries around the world.
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Sharing
changes lives—including our own. |
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Remember
your earliest lessons about sharing? At the time, sharing may have seemed like
a burden, a needless sacrifice—giving up part of what you believed was
rightfully yours.
Over time, however, we come to realize that all of
our gifts come from God, and that sharing actually enriches us. In blessing others
with our gifts, goodness and love flow from our hearts. And blessing returns
to us, subtly but surely changing us, building that desire to respond even more
generously to God’s
call ‘to do good and to share what we have.’
One Great Hour of Sharing offers an opportunity for
each of us to share with people in need around the world—giving them
much more than a handout. When we share our resources, we help to ensure that
children suffering from disease not only receive treatment, but enjoy the benefits
of a community made safer with proper sanitation and clean sources of water.
We partner with a family living in hunger, offering them not just food, but the
tools and training to build a sustainable source of income for themselves—improving
their world and ours.
When we share our resources through One Great Hour of Sharing, we make a difference
in the lives of others. We reach around the world, giving shape to the heart
of Christ.
And when we understand how the blessing of sharing changes lives, our own
lives are never again the same.
“Do not neglect to do good and
to share what you have.”
Hebrews 13:16a

Sharing Resources. Changing lives.
When we give our gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing, we want to be confident
that they will help our sisters and brothers around the world in every kind of
need—the African girl looking for a source of clean water close to home
so she doesn’t have to spend hours each day carrying it from miles away,
the father whose home and fields were destroyed by flood who doesn’t know
how to feed his children until the next season’s crops are in, the mother
who has no means to earn money for her children’s books.
Working with our Presbyterian programs and their trusted partners around the
world, we can indeed be confident that the resources we share will change lives—and
not just the lives of those we think of as being in need. For we ourselves become
more open to the transforming power of God’s love when we open our hearts
to share that love with others through our gifts. As we contemplate the gifts
we will share with those in need around the world, let us thank God for the power
of sharing to transform lives—our own and those of all God’s children
around the world. |
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