The life of Helen Keller always fascinated me. Helen Keller became completely blind and deaf from a sickness at infancy. In those days, becoming both blind and deaf was practically a death sentence. Nobody knew how to communicate with people who became both blind and deaf. Helen knew no human words, not even in her mind, just emotions and reactions to her surroundings. She lived in complete isolation. Helen had no way of expressing her needs, other than screaming, uncontrollable fits.
Helen lived in a world filled with silence, darkness and loneliness. Helen’s parents were at a loss, and they allowed Helen to run wild, breaking and destroying whatever came into her path. Helen’s parents’ last hope was to hire a teacher who might be able to at least train Helen to behave. Helen’s teacher, Anne Sullivan believed that she could teach Helen more than to just behave; she believed that Helen could be taught to communicate through sign language and develop genuine relationships with the world around her, which had proved to be impossible thus far. After weeks of training Helen, and writing sign language into Helen’s small six-year-old hands, it was becoming an exhausting task, as Helen could not understand what the symbols in Ms. Sullivan’s hands represented. Then one day, it happened.
Helen writes in her biography, The Story of My Life, “Some one was drawing water, and my teacher placed my hand under the [water] spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other [hand] the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her figures. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten- a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free…” “Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought…” “Every object I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.”
Helen’s life had no sense of purpose. She simply existed in a dark, lonely, isolated world, until one day she discovered that everything in the world around her had a name. Everything had a name! She had a name! If everything had a name, it had a purpose. It was with this new light that Helen’s world came alive.
YOU have a name! You have a purpose! You may have felt like you’re just existing in a lonely world as just another nameless face on this earth, but I promise you that nothing could be further from the truth. There is a God in heaven who knows your name, and he took great joy in creating YOU. You were designed by God with a specific purpose poured into your DNA. You have something of value to give that nobody else in this world can put out there. It is unique to you, and as you begin to touch the world around you with your uniqueness, not only will you begin to come alive, but the world around you will come alive.
The marvel of this story is that moments leading up to Helen discovering language, she had deviously destroyed the little doll her teacher had given her as a gift. In discovering language and that everything else around her had a purpose, when she came across the doll, with broken pieces still strewed out on the floor, her heart was crushed with grief! Reaching beyond the language barriers, Ms. Sullivan was the first person to truly reach Helen right where she was at and show her that Helen didn’t just EXIST- but that she was a LIFE: a precious life with a purpose. The love that reached beyond language caused Helen (for the first time in her life) to CARE about the pain she had caused someone else!
This is POWER that CARING has on another life. When we show OTHERS that we care for them, they, in turn, learn to care about the lives around them, too… and it multiplies. Simply because one person cared. If you have poured out your life to people around you, and you wonder if you are making a difference, I want to encourage you not to underestimate what you are doing!
My poem, “The Cart Keeper” is about someone who, like Helen Keller, became destructive by an isolated life.
Author Anne Day 