Take Heart

For Such A Time As This: An Interview with Stephen “Doc” Hunsley

• Amy J Brown, Carrie Holt and Sara Clime • Season 2 • Episode 96

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Correction: The Wonderfully Made Conference is October 19-21, 2022.

In this episode we meet Stephen “Doc” Hunsley, hear his incredible story of loss, hope, and how God has used life’s trials to prepare him to lead SOAR and the Wonderfully Made Disability Conference in Kansas City. 

July 26, 2022; Ep. 96

Timestamps & Key Topics:

  • 0:00-    Intro
  • 1:36-    Meet Doc Hunsley
  • 10:00-  Anything To Help
  • 12:59-  Job Change
  • 18:20-  SOAR
  • 28:41-  Wonderfully Made Conference
  • 33:04-  Preparation
  • 44:44-  Don’t Give Up Hope

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Sara Clime  0:00 
Hi and welcome to Take Heart. Our mission here at Take Heart is to offer encouragement, give hope and insight so you can flourish in your journey as a special needs mom. Today is our last episode in our Summer Interview Series, and this is also our last episode of our second season. We want to take a moment to thank all of you, all of our listeners and supporters. You are very much appreciated. We are taking this next month of August off so please join us again on Tuesday, September 6th for our first episode of season three.

Stephen "Doc" Hunsley  1:36 
Hi, it's Sara and I am thrilled to share our final guest in our summer interview series. We are so glad you're here. Our final guest is a special needs dad and ministry leader. Not only that, he understands what it is like to have special medical needs himself which vastly impacted his life. Our guest speaker today is Stephen "Doc" Hunsley. Doc is the executive director and founder of SOAR Special Needs in Lenexa, Kansas. SOAR stands for special opportunities, abilities, and relationships. SOAR serves over 1000 individuals with disabilities through regular respite events and special needs day camps. Doc is currently assisting over 400 churches locally, nationally, and globally in starting a disability ministry. Doc also organizes the Wonderfully Made Conference held annually, every October in Kansas City. Doc is a retired pediatrician while his wife, Kay continues practicing pediatrics. They are proud parents to three beautiful children, Luke, Mark, and Sarah. The Hunsley's middle child, Mark, is presently running the halls of heaven. During Mark's five-year earthly stay he gave his family the opportunity to learn from and love a child with autism. You can follow SOAR on Facebook or connect with Doc on Twitter @dochunsley and www.soarspecialneeds.org.

Sara Clime  2:59 
Well, thanks, Doc. We're so glad that you are here with us, and we're just gonna get started. I know your story, but I know some of our listeners might not so if you will just tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, and your journey on this special needs life and the disability work that you're doing.

Stephen "Doc" Hunsley  3:19 
Absolutely. First, Sara, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here with you and I love having gotten to know you and work with you and your family and the other ladies for the past several years. My story kind of has an interesting journey. Lots of ups and downs. First off, let me start with my name. Everyone who knows me now is Doc Hunsley. But Doc is not my real name. My parents aren't odd. My brother's not Dopey, Humble, or Sleepy. Doc is a nickname, my real name's Stephen, and the "Doc" is a nickname because I'm actually a pediatrician. I was a pediatric ER doctor, and that was my lifelong dream. That's all I ever wanted to do since I was in first grade. I was 46 days into my dream job when I got sick taking care of my patients, and I almost died. In fact, I should have died. Three different times. Doctors told my wife to make plans because I wouldn't make it through the night. If you take the top four diagnoses that I had when I was in that hospitalization. In the top four, each one by itself had a point .01 survival rate. None of the doctors expected me to live. I should not have lived, but it was God having his hand on me, allowing me to live. I was so sick during that hospitalization, that they forgot to give me nutrition with it. As a result, I lost 75 pounds of muscle mass and had to go through nine months of rehab to be able to walk again and just be able to function. I had grown up playing sports all my life. I was also in the Air Force. I was in decent shape. All of a sudden, after that hospitalization, I couldn't even walk up a flight of stairs to our bedroom without almost passing out, because I could barely breathe. I made it through my rehab and then finally made it back to work, 9-10 months later, where I had my flu shot. Despite having my flu shot, my first week back to work, I ended up with influenza, and that put me back into the intensive care unit, where once again, I almost died. It was then determined at that point, that I'm the only known person in the world, where the main muscle that allows you to breathe is called the diaphragm. It goes across your abdomen, and half of mine is paralyzed. That happened during that first hospitalization. Nobody knows why or how, but it happened. If it was completely paralyzed, I'd be dead. It's paralyzed on the right. If I had abnormal lungs, like asthma, or anything like that, I'd be dead. My dad and brother both have severe asthma. Once again, God had his hand on me with that. Quick anatomy lesson for everyone. On the right side of your lungs, you get three lobes of the lung, on the left, you only have two lobes of lungs, because the heart sits there. The left is the only side that works for me. In essence, I only have 40% lung function, because only 40% of my lobes work. That's why I'm always short of breath, walking upstairs and doing anything. I have zero exercise tolerance now, but I can recover fairly quickly because my lungs are healthy. COVID is a major fear and major concern for me because that could kill me. I even got COVID a year and a half ago, but God once again had his hand on me through that. It's a year and a half later, and I'm still having problems smelling, don't have all my smell back yet. I don't do anything normal. When I came out of that second hospitalization shortly after that, my second son Mark was born. I'm blessed with an amazing wife, Kay, where we're coming up on our 27th wedding anniversary this year, and we have three children now. But at the time, my second son Mark was born. We have two boys and a girl. I took a week off for paternity leave to be home with Mark after Kay gave birth, and then I went back to work. My first day back to work, I got a call from my boss and I had started doing some administrative work at the hospital. Now I was realizing I may not be able to be right around patient care all the time, but I can do more administrative things. Well, I got a call from my immediate boss, and he said I had to go to an important meeting at the main hospital. I went down to this meeting. He didn't know what it was about, just told me to get there as quick as I could and walked in, and there were every one of my bosses from my immediate boss to the Chief of Staff, the entire HR department, two rows of attorneys, I never met my life. One row of physicians, I never met in my life, and one chair facing the entire room. They said, "Dr. Hunsley, have a seat and we'll start the meeting." I'm like, oh snap, writing on the wall here, and then proceeded to tell me that I had been a wonderful physician for the hospital. They had great plans for me. However, I became a medical-legal risk to the hospital, and they weren't going to terminate my job. Instead, they terminated my career. Just like that, in a snap, my career was terminated, and they determined that I was disabled from my own occupation. I could no longer practice medicine. I had to permanently hang up my stethoscope. Immediately, I had to collect my belongings and turn in my ID badge, and was escorted out of the hospital. I couldn't change specialties. I couldn't try anything else. It was done. I tried every effort I could to do something else, and that was it. I couldn't do anything else. I then took the hardest job I've ever had in my life, and that was to become Mr. Mom for at the time my two boys. Especially for any of our moms who are listening today, I tip my hat to all of you. That is an incredibly difficult job and one that doesn't get the recognition it deserves. I was honored to be able to take care of my two boys.

(10:01)
When Mark was eight months old, he had his first seizure, and that seizure lasted over four hours. Fast forward, by the time he was 18 months, we got the diagnosis of Dravet Syndrome, a very rare genetic seizure disorder. By the time he was two, got the diagnosis with autism. My wife's a pediatrician as well. We went from being physicians who took care of a lot of kids with special needs to now all of a sudden being a parent of a child with special needs. Really it was the first time in our life that our eyes were opened, and we got it. We understood what it meant to be a parent. It's 24/7 365, you never get a break. The stress is sky-high. You can't go out whenever you want, and even when you do go out, you get the stares, you get the snickers, you get the jeers. I can't tell you the number of times that I've been out with my son, and he's having an autistic meltdown, I would have complete strangers come up to me, and tell me I'm not just a bad parent, but I'm a horrible parent. Because they think my son is just bad behavior because especially with autism, the face of autism frequently is that of a neurotypical child. They can't tell, and they just assume it's poor parenting, or he's harming himself, and I have to protect him and put him in protective holds where he doesn't hurt himself. Then next thing I know, I have police officers coming up to me and threatening to arrest me or threaten to tase me because they think I'm endangering my son. It's just a lack of education, a lack of knowledge. It's flat-out ignorance by the general population, and that really opened my eyes to a lot. We need to do more in teaching. What I say all the time now, if anybody today because autism right now is one out of every 44 births. If you see a child with elementary age, who's misbehaving out in public with parents, please don't think that is a child misbehaving. That is a child with autism who may be having problems with transitioning or something. Don't give judgment on those parents, that it's poor parenting. Instead, why don't you go up to the parents and say, Hey, is there anything I can do to help? I can't tell you. I don't ever remember a time that I've had someone come up and ask me if they could help me. You know what, maybe they can't, but I would sure rather have someone ask me to help than tell me that I'm a horrible parent. I hope that's something someone can take away here.

(12:59)
So fast forward a little bit more when Mark was about three, the church we attended, contacted me about becoming their children's pastor. I thought children's pastor, I'm a doctor, I never went to seminary. I'm not a pastor. But I've always had a heart for kids, and I've worked in ministry all my life. I was working in the children's ministry then, and I  prayed about it. God made it very clear that I needed to become the children's pastor, I had three or four major hurdles that I was dealing with for the previous three years, prayed about it. Literally, within seventy-two hours, God removed all three or four of those hurdles. Okay, God, I hear you, I guess I'm gonna be a children's pastor. I became a children's pastor and grew the ministry from about 100 kids to 1000 kids over a several-year period of time. After about a year or so, of being in that position, I went to the senior pastor, obviously, having a son with special needs. Then also having other kids with disabilities in the children's ministry. I went to the senior pastor and said, "Hey, you know what, I would love to start a special needs ministry." Because I had learned already as a parent, how difficult it is to be able to go to church with a child with special needs and find the care and support that you need for them. I shared my heart with the pastor and his immediate reply to me was, "No, Doc, I don't want those kinds of people here." I'm like, timeout, I'm those people. He says, "Oh, no, Doc, we love you. We love your family. I just don't want those people." Really what he was saying is, that families with disabilities don't have a lot of money and therefore they won't tithe, so I don't want them to come. It is just another way of discriminating. It really opened my eyes to the church, and what is happening in the church. In fact, today, only 11% of evangelical churches in the United States, welcome families with disabilities into their church and have actual programming for them. Yes, I said, 11%, which means 88% of churches today have that same attitude. They'll actually tell families, that they're not welcome, and they have to leave the church. We had to agree to disagree. About a year later, I got called back into the office because we had about three adults with disabilities who became very vocal during the worship service. Ended up I was told to get rid of them so that they wouldn't be distracting anymore. I didn't argue I didn't say anything I said I'd be happy to. Instead, I started an adult Sunday school class for adults with disabilities and then started a small respite for those adults and their families because I saw how much those families needed it. I knew how much the families needed it, ourselves, being a parent knowing even though we had family who support us, our family got to the point where they weren't comfortable taking care of our son anymore and just couldn't do it. Our family was desperate for breaks. But nobody ever offers to do that. You can't just get the neighbor girl to come in. So did that. About eleven and a half years ago, my son Mark was cured of everything, cured of the Dravet Syndrome, and cured of autism when he was born into heaven at the age of five and a half. We were blessed with him for five and a half years, learned all the highs and lows of being a parent of a child with a disability, and then walked through the grief of losing a child with a disability. Six weeks after he passed away, my intestine exploded on me, and I almost died again. I joke all the time, I feel like a cat. I had so many near-death experiences, and I hate cats. It's just the joke God has with me. God definitely has more entailed for me. It was during my time of recovery, and going through grief as well that God made it clear it was time for us to leave that church. We ended up leaving the church, I didn't know where to go. I felt God saying Grace Church, I'm like, Grace, what church? What's that middle name,  and I ended up just putting it into Google: Grace Church and found out there's a Grace Church not too far from where we were, and went and visited. We went through a lot of hurts. We had a lot of attacks on our family from the church after we left. We need a time of healing just for going through losing our son, for me, basically losing my second career. I knew God told me to give up being the children's pastor, and I loved that. I truly thought I'd never have another opportunity like that again. I was grieving that as well, and then we went to Grace Church.

(18:21)
After several months, we realized that truly was where God wanted us to go. I met with a children's pastor and told him in order for me to heal emotionally, physically, and spiritually, I need to serve others. It's always better when I can get my mind off myself and onto other people. I do better. Five minutes after that, I got a phone call from him and their senior pastor. They said, "Doc, we've wanted to have a world-class children's ministry for years, but we're unable to do that unless we do a special needs ministry." Now, I never said a single thing to them ever about special needs. They said, "Doc, we've been praying for years to have a special needs ministry, but no one's ever been able to do it. We know all about you. We stalked you socially. We've heard about you. We believe God brought you to us to start a special needs ministry. Would you do that?" I told him I really have no clue what I'm doing, but I'd love to try. September of 2011 was the start of SOAR Special Needs. SOAR started as a ministry in Grace Church, and it stands for Special Opportunities, Abilities, and Relationships. We started with just what we knew we had at that church at that time, the church was about 1200 people, and we knew we had three individuals with disabilities. We started serving them and met their needs. I quickly joined the staff as their special needs disability pastor. I did all that as a volunteer. I was a children's pastor at the church is 100% volunteer. Over the next eight years, I grew that ministry from serving three individuals to serving over 800 individuals with disabilities in the church. It grew up from one campus to four campuses, including the online campus and we really saw God bless it. We started doing camps and respite events, and the national Wonderfully Made Disability Ministry Conference. Then two years ago, the church came to me and said, "Doc, we know what your plans your visions are, that God's given you. We're afraid if you stay at Grace Church, you're never going to be able to reach those goals that God's laid on your heart. We want to bless you, we want to send you out, and help SOAR become an independent nonprofit." December of 2019, just in time for COVID, we became an independent nonprofit. SOAR now exists to transform the lives of special families, and we empower them to soar in their local and faith communities. SOAR helps answer the three main questions that every family with an individual with a disability has. The first question is will my child ever be able to take care of them? Will they ever be able to provide for themselves? The second question is, who's going to take care of my child once I'm gone? The third question is who's going to be able to take care of me as a parent or caregiver? Sara, those were the three questions that kept me up at night, while my son was alive. I was too scared to ask those questions out loud. I never talked about them with my wife. It wasn't until after Mark passed away, that I found out they were my wife's questions too. Now with SOAR, every parent I talked to, those are really their three big questions, but they've been taboo. No one wants to talk about them because they don't know the answers or they're fearful of the answers. At SOAR, we embrace them, and we're happy to be working on that and get things going. We do a lot of different things. One, we're based in the Greater Kansas City area, but we serve the entire country, and we serve globally as well. Right now we provide respite on a monthly basis, and we call it sorely needed r&r because as we all know, as parents, it is sorely needed. On a monthly basis, we rotate through the greater Kansas City area. On a Friday and or Saturday, we give parents two to three hours off completely free, where we take care of the individual with disability. Currently, we take care of all ages, all diagnoses all severities. We won't turn anyone away from anything that we do. Our age span right now, we're currently, we're serving our youngest is birth, and our oldest right now is 73 years old. I can't wait until we have a 90-year-old someday. We also take care of the siblings, because siblings don't have a normal life, and the why is respite so important. The divorce rate for families with disabilities is sky-high. It's estimated to be around 90%. If you add a medical diagnosis, like seizures, or diabetes, it jumps to 95%. We want to be able to help them out. We provide a full medical team, a full behavior team, and then we have volunteers to help with everything. We always say we only have one requirement for someone to be able to serve and volunteer with us. It's a simple question, can you be a friend? Because if you can be a friend, we can teach you everything else. You don't need to know how to work with an individual with a disability. There's no need to be afraid of them. Every individual with a disability is fearfully and wonderfully made. They're created in the image and likeness of God, and they have so much love to give. They truly are a blessing. I want everyone to experience that blessing by serving and working with them. We also host on a monthly basis, virtual respites for an hour over zoom, and we have people from all over the country and actually globally. A few months back, we had an individual from Romania join us for that. So it's fun. We're usually on a Tuesday night, from 7 to 8 pm Central Standard Time, we'll be on virtually over zoom. It's completely free, and it's fun. We'll do interactive games. It's fine if you're nonverbal, we're able to still interact with you there on that and all kinds of things. We've done amusement park rides before where we've actually done videos and you feel like you're riding the roller coaster. For some of these kids that was the first time they've ever haven't experienced anything like that. We love just trying to think outside the box and work with that. We're giving community to these individuals and helping them create friendships. We got a couple who have formed great friendships, but they live 2000 miles apart, and they can't wait to see each other on Zoom. In fact, I've heard now that they've kind of set up their own zoom times, every other week or so they can see each other more frequently. Then in the summer, we do summer camps, eight hours a day for five days. We do our own theme and write all of our own curricula. This year, it's SOARing for the Son. We're doing three camps in the greater Kansas City area, and always looking for help and things that are with that. We also firmly believe I've already touched on the churches. We firmly believe every family with an individual with a disability should be able to go to a place of faith of their choosing. Like I said, only 11% of churches welcome families. That's not acceptable. We've got to change that. SOAR has set a goal to assist 1000 churches in the next five years in developing disability ministry at their church and welcoming families in showing the church how to welcome them and integrate them into the church. To date, we've now assisted over 400 churches throughout the United States, and 12 countries around the world. We're on our way. We're very happy and very proud of that, but we still have a long ways to go. If anyone's listening here, and you're, you're wishing your church would do more, just contact us at SOAR www.soarspecialneeds.org. It's completely free, we'll do a free consultation with the church and all kinds of things we can do to come alongside. We'll even take churches who are already doing something and help them take that to the next level.

Sara Clime  26:55 
I can personally vouch for that too because I know with our church, we were firmly planted. Myself and Leslie, you met with both of us and walked us through it, and it took the fear away and the unknown away. Our staff didn't know about the legality of it or what documents. We had no idea. We knew how to be special needs parents. Can we really do this? If anybody's listening is like, I know, our church would accept it, but we can't find anybody to do it, I would highly encourage you to start it. Leslie and I joke all the time, that the best thing and the worst thing about having special needs parents run a ministry is that you have special needs parents run a ministry. It's great. It is exhausting. Once you start it, people are going to just gravitate to it. You set us up for success to where we could hit the ground running. We didn't have to worry about all the documents and all of the unknowns. You thought that through. I would highly recommend it, and we'll have all of your contact information in our show notes. You guys just go there. You can reach out to doc or you can email us, and we'll put you in touch with Doc and Elizabeth as well. I've also been to your Wonderfully Made Conference, and I probably cut you off on that. I would love for you to talk about the Wonderfully Made Conference. It was one of the first things I ever attended as a special needs, "minister" or volunteer or special needs ministry leader. It really was a game-changer for me. I would love for you to talk about that.

Stephen "Doc" Hunsley  28:41 
Yeah, absolutely happy to. So our Wonderfully Made Disability Conference. It's actually the largest disability conference in the country. For us, we have two tracks: one track geared towards families, and then a second track geared towards disability ministry leaders, volunteers, and then organizations working with individuals with disabilities and special needs. It's going to be a three-day conference this year. We're very excited. We are getting back in person. Finally, after COVID. For the last two years we've had to be virtual due to COVID, but this year, we will be back in person. We're very, very happy with that. Our conference will be from October the 19th through October the 21st in Kansas City, and we've got some of the top speakers literally from all over the world that will be joining us for it. We've got attendees from all over the world. We're hoping to have about 400 attendees this year. October is Disability Awareness Month, so it's a great time. That conference again is the October 19th to the 21st. That's a Wednesday through Friday. We're going to have also some special evening activities. We'll have one geared towards parents, so you can meet with other parents. We'll have one for ministry leaders where you can meet with other ministry leaders. Then we're going to try something new, as you know, SOAR's a nonprofit, and we're going to do our first fundraiser, hopefully. The day before the conference, we're going to do a golf tournament. If anyone is a golfer out there and interested in that you can come out and be part of the golf tournament. Then also pre-conference the two days before. I'm also a nationally certified instructor for CPI, nonviolent crisis, intervention training, which is really good for any church, their leadership to be able to do that. We're going to have that available as well. That will be training, there, that'll be an additional part with that. Our whole thing with the conference is that we want you to know that, you have strength for today and hope for tomorrow. That's what it's all about. As a parent, we want to fill your tool belt, with things that you need to know about being a parent. Just some of the ideas that we've got will be how to fight and be an advocate for your child at school with IEPs. Preparing special needs trusts and Able ads. Here, here's a big one, again, we're willing to tackle the taboo: how to prepare to grieve for your children. A lot of us have kids who we know they've got a fatal diagnosis. Well, we need to prepare for that day to come. We can't just stick our heads in the sand, that's not going to come. We've got a parent who, who she's got a son who had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and autism, and he passed away a little over a year ago, and she's now become a death doula and walks through hospice and everything with families. She's going to share a lot of the things that she's learned. I'm really excited to hear, hear that. On the ministry side, we'll have things on how to start a ministry to take, take what you have, and approve it. I'm thinking I'm working on a new talk myself, Naked, vomiting, and afraid, everything you need to know to run a ministry. Because those are all things I've seen running a disability ministry. What do you do when you've got a child who starts running around naked? What do you do when they're vomiting? What do you do when they're afraid? Well, we need to talk through that. It'll kind of be your one for our veteran leaders to talk through that. Take the naked, vomiting, and afraid, and have a little bit of fun. If you can't tell with me. I like to, you know, have puns and go with things.

(33:03)
The other thing I'm super excited about, Sara. Nowhere in the Bible, does it say only those with an IQ over 70 should go into all the world and share the gospel. It flat out says all. I don't know why we put disclaimers on things in the Bible, but we do. I love that there are organizations all over the world that do missions trips to go serve individuals and families with disabilities all over the world. That's fantastic. However, there's not a single organization that I've ever found, that will actually take families and individuals with disabilities to go serve others. Not one. SOAR is going to be that first organization. We are working in Belize, where we're helping create a special needs family camp. We're working in Kenya, Africa, where we're helping them create respite programs, and a church training program to train every church in Kenya on how to welcome families with disabilities. Then we're creating programming in the Middle East as well. We're gonna see in the next 18 months, how we can start taking mission trips, and taking families with disabilities to go serve. My key word in life, and you've heard me share a lot. I've left out a whole lot more. I've had nothing now but 15 years of trial after trial. I could have sat here and said, "Oh, woe is me. God, I'm pissed at you. I'm mad at you. I've lost my health multiple times. I've lost two major careers. I've lost my son." Lack of better words. It sucks. I could take the perspective focusing on myself how bad this is and woe was me this really stinks. Instead, God's helped me change my perspective, to see how he's prepared me for everything. Now, as the executive director and founder of SOAR, I can truly look back over the last 15 years, everything I've gone through has prepared me for such a day as this. I've applied everything, or I'm able to use all my medical training because we're taking care of medically fragile kids that no one else will touch. I'm able to come alongside families who are dealing with grief after losing a child, and that's all because of what God's put me through and allowed me to do. I've taken the perspective that there's so much positivity that can happen. As a parent of a child with a disability, it's normal, I've been there. Today's just a horrible day. Oh, my gosh, can you believe I had to wait 45 minutes for the doctor's meeting? We had another meltdown today. Families will talk to me all the time. I do a lot of counseling where I will say, "I would do anything for one more bad day with my son." Yeah. Wow, that changes perspective all a sudden where you realize oh, well, yeah, we did have some other good things. It wasn't just that. Now let's look at families around the world that have disabilities. If you've got a child with a disability in a foreign country, it's considered disgraceful, it's considered shameful, or even sinful. These parents tried to hide their kids. They don't want anyone to know they even have them. If they go to work, they'll tie their child to a tree or chain them to a tree for eight to twelve hours a day, with no food, no water, urine, and defecate on themselves, or they dig a hole six feet deep in the ground, and put wood planks over it and throw them in there. Again, no food or water. That's everyday life with these kids. They don't get medical care. There's a child in Belize that I believe just recently passed away who had such bad scoliosis at the age of 12, that was curved into a "C" that crushed their internal organs. It's because he never got medical treatment. Well, if we take families here to go down there, their perspective will change because they'll see how much they had to be thankful for here. At the same time, as families there, we'll see what can happen when you actually pour into an individual, a child with a disability, and how they truly are fearfully and wonderfully made. What happens, both of those lives in all those kids, their lives are transformed. That's what SOAR is all about now. That's a real long story for me, and we've got a whole long laundry list of things we want to do in the future. We're hoping to end up going nationally, and globally, with everything we're doing. We're creating vocational programs. We're gonna be looking at creating housing, and many, many more things. God's opened my eyes to my past, to be able to do this and SOAR now is just a huge blessing for us. It truly is the legacy of my son. If you ever look at our logo, you'll see the main colors are green and purple. Green, was Mark's favorite color. That's truly his legacy living on. Purple, that's the color for epilepsy and Dravet Syndrome, both of which Mark had. Green and purple that is Mark living on through SOAR. We are touching 1000s of individuals, touching 1000s of families now all because a little ornery redheaded boy broke my heart for families with disabilities and completely opened my eyes to a world that I didn't know existed. I'm bound and determined to make a difference and make everybody's world better. Many parents feel like they don't have a voice. Doc Hunsley is going to be your voice. I'm standing up. I will be the bull in the china closet and stand up and speak for these kids who don't have the voice and families who are beaten down because we need to. We need to lock arms together and that's what SOAR is about. We want to help our families truly transform their lives and truly SOAR like no other. So that's the long story of me and what I'm all come from.

Sara Clime  39:23 
Well, I love it. I've heard your story before, and I knew if I just had you tell your story you were going to touch on everything that I wanted to touch on and what our listeners would need to hear. All of the irons that you have in the fire, how can we stay on top of it and just be involved in everything. We're gonna have all the links in the show notes, but I would love for you to let everybody know how we can join you and how we can support you?

Stephen "Doc" Hunsley  39:48 
Absolutely. There are a lot of different ways that you can come on board. First, I want to say, parents, anyone out there who's listening, if you've got an idea of something that you'd like to see done or wish was happening, please contact us and let us know. I am all about trying to think outside the box. I didn't even mention this, but one of the things we're trying right now, because I keep hearing from families all the time of adults with higher functioning disabilities, like high functioning autism, that while they're out in the community, they may have jobs, they have no community because no one's really making friends with them. They're now really dealing with depression. I took that and said, "Well, what can we do?" Well, it's pretty easy. We can create SOAR social clubs, where two to three hours, maybe once a week, maybe every other week or month, we'll get together for two or three hours with these individuals, get dinner, play games, and just give them an opportunity to meet with others. Well, that's because I heard from my parents. Anyone out there, if there's something that's really heavy on your heart, that's concerning, let us know. We want to see how we can maybe help solve that or help others solve that. You can go to our website to learn more about us at www.soarspecialneeds.org. Again, SOAR is s-o-a-r soar like an eagle, www.soarspecialneeds.org If you want to keep up to date on everything that we do, I encourage you to join our email list. You can do that either on the website, or just email us at info@sourcespecialneeds.org. We'd love to put you on the list. That way you'd know, that whenever things are coming up, everybody is welcome to come to our Wonderfully Made Conference. We're going to have hotels available for that. Our virtual respites, even if you're not in the Greater Kansas City area. That's something you can join anywhere. If you want to have your church get help, have us come alongside them again, and contact us there. That's the place to do it, or you can just go to the website. There's actually a place on the website where you can click for a free consult for your church. Maybe you're sitting there and you're saying, "You know what I love what SOAR is doing. I want to lock arms and partner with them financially." You can do that too. Just go to www.soarspecialneeds.org/ donate. We're always looking for ministry partners who want to, one, pray for us we covet that. We rarely charge for anything we do. The only two things we charge for is our camp and our conference. It's pretty much just to break even. We are highly dependent on donors for everything else. We're always looking for volunteers as well. Like I said earlier, I've only got one requirement and that is can you be a friend, and we'll teach you everything else. If you're interested in becoming part of our mission trips, love to talk to you about that or anything else. We also have internships this summer, a 10-week internship. Maybe you have, a high school junior-senior, maybe college students who are looking to go into a career dealing with special needs, somehow. How better to come and do a 10-week internship where they will have hands-on experience working with this. I promise you, it'll look amazing on a resume. Again, contact us there for that. That is a paid internship. If you're from out of town, we do have a couple of housing available that would be free for them. We do have some options there, so we'd love to talk with you about that. Like I said, If anyone has any other ideas, we're an open book, and we'd love to talk through it. We dream. We dream big, and we got a big God. We believe there's a lot more work that has to happen, and we're just gonna take it a day at a time. Maybe, you're sitting there saying, I've got an idea for a talk at the Wonderfully Made Conference. We need speakers. We're getting ready to put out a call for speakers. Put together a proposal to be a speaker. We'll look at that. That's a definite possibility. Sara went from being an attendee to being a speaker and has done a great job with that. Her son even became part of our keynote last year and I was honored to have him be a part of us with that. The sky's the limit.

(44:44)
The big thing I want everyone to know is to never give up hope. Yeah, always keep hope. Don't ever think you can't do anything. If there's something you want to do, or it's something you're trying to figure out how to get done, keep focused on that. If you don't know how to do it, it's okay. Just keep asking until you find someone that knows how to do it. Contact us. We may not know how to do it, but we might know someone who can help, or maybe we can help in doing it. Don't keep it in. Some of the best ideas that we've got come from other people. All the ideas I've had, they're not my ideas, I give them all to God. He's given them to me because I'm not smart enough to come up with ideas of what we're doing. We want to be an encouragement to everyone. One of the other fun things we're in the process of creating is a parent mentoring program. So, maybe you're a parent out there and that might be something that resonates with you. We need people to help us. We're in the design stage of that, we need people who can help be part of our team in designing that program, and create the training for that program where we'll take parents who have older kids with disabilities, who can now come alongside newly diagnosed parents and walk them through that journey of life. I know I would have loved to have had someone walk alongside me or in our early stages, even just to tell me, you're gonna need to apply for the waiver, but you're not gonna get it. There's a 13-year wait. I would have been a whole lot better off knowing that ahead of time, instead of learning that two years after I applied when nothing's happened because as we all know, poor communication with government agencies. It's just things like that. Lots of things that you can help us out with, you do not have to be in the Greater Kansas City area to make an impact. You can be anywhere. All you have to do is allow yourself the freedom to transform the life of someone else. It requires you to give up a little bit of yourself, in order to transform someone's life. You'll be amazed at the kind of blessing that'll come back.

Sara Clime  47:24 
I think too often as special needs parents, we are so busy and so overwhelmed, and we focus so much on advocating for our children and showing others and even showing our children that they can do anything. They're their only limit, sometimes when it comes to thinking outside the box. Sure, it'll look different than it will for other people. But I tell my son, it might not look like your peers, but you can do something extremely special. We often don't feel that we can do it because our whole world revolves around our children. We're called to actually help others as well, not just our children. I think that you bring that capability to parents. I know Elizabeth who is heading up the parent mentoring program, she's phenomenal to work with. I've thoroughly enjoyed working with her on that. There's just a level of community that you bring on multiple levels, that SOAR brings on multiple levels that we are very appreciative. I can't thank you enough for being here and for sharing all this with us. Again, everything that Doc has talked about, all of the links, we are going to have multiple links in the show notes. If there's something that you have a question, about and you just can't find it, make sure to email us at takeheartspecialmoms@gmail.com, and we will put you in touch with them. They're readily available. This is not just words that are spoken. They definitely have love and action, whenever I think of SOAR, I just think it's love and action. I really appreciate that. Thank you for being here with us again, Doc. We are just very honored to have you here. We pray for everything that your ministry is doing. We pray specifically over you guys as well.

Stephen "Doc" Hunsley  49:20 
Well, thank you so much been my pleasure and honor to be here with you. I'll just throw a shout-out to all the moms. I want to encourage all of you. I know being a mom is hard just to begin with, but then being a mom of a child with special needs or disability raises that 10/20-fold. It's hard, and you don't get the credit a lot of time. It's just very difficult. I want to sit here and say, you're doing a great job. Keep up the fight. Keep being the advocate for your child. No matter how old they are, you will always be their advocate. Don't give up on finding help for yourself. The most important thing that you can do for your child is to take care of yourself and find the help that you need and hopefully SOAR might be one of the things that we can do for that. See how you can help yourself out with everything, and as we say for everybody, we hope you all come "SOAR" with us.

Sara Clime  50:30 
Thanks, doc.

Stephen "Doc" Hunsley  50:32 
Have a great day.

Sara Clime  50:49 
Thanks for joining us this week on Take Heart. Our prayer each week is for your heart to be encouraged. We are grateful you are walking on this journey with us. If you have any questions or comments, follow the links in our show notes. We love hearing from our listeners. We are taking the next month of August off. Please join us on Tuesday, September 6 For our first episode of season three.