Seeing the LightBefore 1985 blind people had limited opportunities for employment which mostly involved caning chairs, making brooms tuning pianos or being a musician. Before that, we were dependent on family or the charity of strangers. Rare was the Galileo, Milton or Homer who carved a niche for himself in history in spite of his blindness

Before 1985 blind people had limited opportunities for employment which mostly involved caning chairs, making brooms tuning pianos or being a musician. Before that, we were dependent on family or the charity of strangers. Rare was the Galileo, Milton or Homer who carved a niche for himself in history in spite of his blindness. The room in which I teach we call the "Brooms to Bytes" room since it was originally a broom factory but now is a modern computer lab. To use these computers we have many tools such as screen readers, optical character recognition software, refreshable braille displays and talking GPS. It's is not easy learning these devices and software products. My screen reader is called "JAWS." In order to use the Internet effectively, I must know 45 to 50 different keyboard commands and key combinations. All this to take the place of something you do with a single mouse click. All this technology, all this effort to learn and use these complex devices is to substitute for vision. We can spend thousands of dollars and dozens of hours learning in order to solve just one small aspect of our blindness. Is this not unlike our spiritual world? Paul said "We see through a glass darkly." We see but dimly into that shadowy realm of the Spirit. All of life on our side of the veil is but a faded sepia of heaven’s realities. We who live in physical darkness sometimes yearn for the light. We who live in the darkness of this world crave the Light Who is beyond our physical vision. We pray, we sing, we worship and are blessed; we fellowship and participate but it is a meager substitute for one moment in the sunshine of His presence, a "tool" to bridge the gap between our spiritual blindness and the time when we will see, truly see, the Sunshine of the universe. Now and ever, be Thou our vision, Lord Jesus. 2/4/08