Accommodating

When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in^[a] Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 6:20-23

Lutheran Special Education Ministries is an organization that hires educators with many specific traits. First and foremost, we want teachers who understand that the work we are doing allows the students we serve to be academically successful in an environment where God’s love is not only present but celebrated. While our teachers don’t teach religion, we stand in agreement with the faith building work of the school. This is often done in a subtle manner. We ask our teachers to model Christ’s love in their interactions with their students and schools. For many, this relates to the “Golden Rule” of treating others how you want to be treated. But it goes deeper than that. Our teachers demonstrate a promise of God to us every day in a way that even they may not realize.

You can’t work with any student, let alone a student with learning differences, without using accommodations. These can be defined as, “an alteration of environment, curriculum format, or equipment that allows an individual with a disability to gain access to content and/or complete assigned tasks.”* In simpler terms, it provides a way for a person to accomplish something by overcoming obstacles that would otherwise prevent them from doing so. Our teachers skillfully assess the performance of their students and provide accommodations designed to help the students face learning challenges most effectively. This is a wonderful thing in the academic world, but what does is have to do with our relationship with God?

Everything. Absolutely everything!

Students with learning differences require a different approach to have success in school. If not, they will be left to languish in their struggles, unable to realize their full potential.

Sound like anyone you know?

Sound like EVERYONE you know? It should…

From the time of the creation of the world, God had established a plan for His creation, much like a teacher’s classroom plan. It laid out how we would live, grow, learn, and behave. Like most classroom plans in schools, it didn’t take long for the pupils to find a loophole; challenging the plan so badly that it was no longer effective in its original state.

You see, you have a problem. So do I. We all do. It’s called sin, and it is so damaging, it required God to establish the single greatest accommodation plan in history.

God sent Jesus into the world to provide for us a way to overcome our sin problem. Without His death and resurrection, we would be languishing in our sin struggle, unable to realize the full potential of what God had created us for in the first place. Sound familiar?

Can anyone deny how important Christ’s accommodation is to us? Some teachers dismiss accommodations in schools as an unnecessary and unhelpful “dumbing down” of their curriculum. They may feel that students who are incapable of doing the work shouldn’t be in the class. If they do take the class and they struggle with keeping up, they should work a little harder and everything will be fine.

Ever try to work harder to stop sinning? How’d that work out for ya?

You and I both know that it failed miserably because sin for us isn’t something we decided to do. It’s a part of our makeup. Or as Paul declared in Romans 3:23 when he wrote, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Now that we have established in verse 23 that we all have the disability of sin, what do you hope verse 24 says?

You can pick from the following:

1. “So, if you can’t do it, quit and do something else.”
2. “But if you just try a little harder, you can do better.”
3. “…and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

Obvious answer isn’t it. But wait, isn’t that just dumbing it down for us as Christians in the same way the teachers are being asked to dumb it down? Hardly. Jesus provides us with salvation. We did nothing to earn it and frankly, we don’t deserve it, so don’t think for a moment that this suggests any type of works righteousness. However, let me ask you to reflect on how easy it is to live life as a Christian in a world that grows more combative toward religion and more specifically Christianity every day? What’s more, God doesn’t tell us to merely exist and hide our faith outside of our Sunday morning worship routine. We are called to go out into the world and share the love of Christ with those who need to hear it. From what I can see, nobody is simplifying anything for us as believers. But here again, God shows His love for us by providing us the accommodation of the Holy Spirit, who Jesus promised to send to us to build us up in the faith and to always be with us as we serve Him in the ways to which we have been called.

I thank God for the accommodations He has provided in our lives – whether created by teachers for our students or by God Himself. May we utilize them to the fullest so that we may learn what we need to be who He has called us to be now and forever.

* Definition Source: https://www.washington.edu/doit/what-difference-between-accommodation-and-modification-student-disability#:~:text=The%20term%20%22accommodation%22%20may%20be,a%20regular%20course%20of%20study

Devotion by Richard Schumacher,

Senior Director of Operations