Daily Word of Grace # 56 (June 2, 2020)
Several summers ago I had the privilege of visiting Tuscumbia, Alabama and touring the childhood home of one of my heroes, Helen Keller (1880-1968), the brilliant lady who through the untiring work of her teacher Anne Sullivan overcame being stricken with blindness and deafness as a nineteen-month old toddler. Helen went on to graduate from college, author several books, and be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She inspired millions of people as she addressed issues of human rights and peace. At her childhood home is the actual well where Anne Sullivan taught Helen her first word, “water” which she learned as Anne gently held her hands under the running water from the well. In order to help compensate for her loss of sight and hearing, Helen’s sense of touch was extremely acute, and as she recounts in her 1903 autobiography The Story of My Life, “The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart” (100). In Jesus Christ God became Anne Sullivan to a world of Helen Keller’s, and touched a blind and deaf world with hands teeming with sunbeams of grace, hands that hold ours under the running water of life (John 4:14)—hands that warm our heart and remind us in our darkness and silence that we are still loved unconditionally by the Creator and Redeemer of the world.
Love and Prayers,
Dave