A college internship landed Stefani Sequeira, a psychology major from Nicaragua, in a therapy center in Mexico that served young adults with disabilities. As she got to know them, she began to wonder: “Should I share the gospel with these students? If so, how?”
One pastor told her, “People with disabilities have a kind of free pass to heaven—like infants who die very young.” But Stefani still felt a burden for these friends, and when one of the students she’d been working with died, she started praying her question.
“I started looking in the Bible for myself and realized the gospel is really to be shared with everyone, and that each one of us a sinner in need of salvation. That includes people with disability! My next question was, ‘How can I help the students understand me?’”
That journey led Stefani to shift her degree focus to Special Education (a relatively new field in Mexico and across Latin America) and to pursue opportunities to serve in church and ministry contexts.
Stefani (right) meets with a student.
Today, Stefani is a missionary with Word of Life in Mexico. Her research on tools for sharing the gospel with people affected by disability led her to connect with seeJesus’ Bethesda ministry’s Felicia Grandinette, who has been meeting with her by Zoom and training her in how to use the materials.
“[Before Bethesda] I found lots of materials that share Bible stories with people affected by disability, but none that really explained the gospel,” she shares.
“Recently I was at a conference here in Mexico for parents of teenagers affected by disability, and someone asked about materials that could help with discipleship of these students. The speaker said she didn’t know of any. I wanted to raise my hand and talk about the Bethesda materials, but I didn’t want to disrupt the session. I connected with the speaker later and told her about Bethesda, and she was excited to hear they may be translated soon!”
“We really need tools like this to help us,” Stefani continued. “Our culture is several years behind the U.S. in how we educate and teach people affected by disability, so to have any resources at all would make a huge difference.”
Our Bethesda team is working, as we speak, to get their cornerstone study, Compassion, translated into Spanish. You can support the work of translating these materials and making them available to Stefani and others here.
