Category: Uncategorized
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I thought the answer was Lithuania (read to find out what the question was)
In my second year of Bible College, I chose to go on student exchange, to study for a semester at a similar Christian College in the port city of Klaipeda, Lithuania. In fact, it was the first liberal arts college to open in the former Soviet Union. This was in…
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Get Comfortable with Silence
The Bible College I went to had such a relationship with the local secular university that all course credits could be transferred between them. Any course taken at either school could count towards one’s degree from either kinda-thing. This meant that students from the Bible College often took courses at…
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Hoping for Change
When I was in my first year of Bible College, there was a young man on campus named Tom. He’d been around for at least a year or two already. A lot of people talked about Tom, and not in a good way. “You’ll never guess what Tom said yesterday…
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When Shyness is Really Autism
I’ve been writing a lot about being gracious to those who unknowingly picked on me, or were unnecessarily hard on me for being autistic. That is the place I want to come from in writing what I’m about to write. I’m working hard on not being one of those people…
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Read books by non-speaking autistic people
I want to take this opportunity to encourage late-identified autistic adults to read books written by non-speaking autistic people. Non-speaking autistic people rarely go undiagnosed for long, at least in this part of the world. Something like that gets noticed. I’m talking to those of us who can speak and…
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On the way to eternity
When you’re the parent of an obviously disabled child, like our Clark, your child is no less beautiful, no less miraculous because of being disabled. When I look at him, I still see myself, I still see my husband whom I love, and I still see a little boy who…
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Aventures in taking autistic kids to mass
Mr. Cole and I definitely have our stories about taking autistic kids to mass, but all the best ones have one thing in common: Clark, our eleven-year-old non-speaking autistic son. We had a bit of culture shock coming from an evangelical Protestant background to the Catholic Church because of the…
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“Spotting” autism
Autism does not have any physical characteristics, so when people talk about “looking autistic,” what they mean is they can tell from the person’s behaviour. Sometimes, a person’s autism will show up in something like the way they move (they may appear uncoordinated), or the fact that they’re flapping their…
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A Very Strange Thing
What a strange thing it is to be a late-diagnosed autistic person! I heard a late-diagnosed man on YouTube once talking about the shock of being told so late in life, “Oh, by the way, you know the way you’ve been all your life, what you thought were just your…
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Is autism a disability?
Here’s where I come down on whether or not autism is a disability (a controversial topic among autistic people): it is. I know why some autistic people get so passionate, insisting it’s not: they want embrace the positives of living with it rather than dwelling on the negatives; maybe they…
Helena Mary Cole 