I’ve always been fascinated with the true story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan as depicted in the movie, The Miracle Worker. Helen Keller was born in 1880 and an illness during infancy left Helen blind, deaf and with no ability to speak. Helen’s parents were compassionate but clueless on how to reach her.
Helen appeared oblivious to her condition. Because she could neither see nor hear, she didn’t comprehend language or what life was about. Helen’s greatest pleasures were being rocked by her mother and having the freedom to grab fistfuls of food from family member’s plates and mash it into her mouth whenever she pleased.
But Helen knew nothing of feeding on the things that would nourish her mind or her soul. She was dead to those things. Helen’s parents hired Annie Sullivan as a live-in teacher in the hope that somehow, some way she could reach Helen and teach her words.
Annie’s first task was to teach Helen some basic manners. Helen resisted and out of pity, her family interfered with her lessons. Annie’s methods may have looked harsh and heartless, but she needed to capture Helen’s undivided attention so that she could be taught.
If Helen could only learn words, an entire world would open up to her, a world that was beautiful and stimulating. Annie knew that sign language would provide Helen the opportunity to grow, to develop and become all she was capable of being.
Helen fought Annie’s instructions and rebelled against her teacher’s love. Even so, Annie persisted teaching Helen, often repeating the same lesson again and again. In one particularly moving scene, Annie furiously pumps water into Helen’s hand, forming the word W A T E R in her other hand. Repeatedly the teacher presses this precious word into Helen’s palm. (See Movie Clip Here).
Then a spark ignites — a glimmer of understanding crosses Helen’s face and she tentatively presses the letters W A T E R back into Annie’s palm. Annie excitedly nods and cups Helen’s hands to her face, “Yes” she cries. Helen’s appetite for words is born and we see her hungrily seeking more and more words while Annie carefully presses each letter that makes the word into her open hand, nodding and laughing and crying, “Yes, Yes, Yes!”
Language was something Helen never could have imagined as a blind, deaf and mute child, but because of Annie Sullivan’s faithfulness and love, Helen Keller not only learned to read, write and to speak, but she went on and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1904. Helen Keller became an author, lectured worldwide and received many honors and distinctions. She said “I thank God for my handicaps, for through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God.”
Helen Keller found joy, happiness and purpose in life once she was able to learn what her teacher wanted to teach her. Prior to Annie’s involvement in her life, Helen Keller was dead to her true self. She hovered around her family’s dinner table filling herself with what pleased her taste buds.
Spiritually you and I are like Helen Keller. We are blind, deaf and mute. We don’t understand or know how to speak God’s language and we are oblivious to what we are missing. Sometimes we live as if real joy and the good life is found rummaging around the world’s banquet table stuffing ourselves with temporal delights.
But God reminds us that he has created us for more than we can think or even imagine. We are designed to reflect his glory, not our own. He shows us that his ways are better but we will never see or know or experience them unless – until – we begin to get a glimpse, a taste of more real life than what we presently experience.
Then like Helen, we must yield ourselves fully to Jesus so that he can teach us what we need to learn and help us live it.
God knows the end for which we were made. He knows how to get us there if only we will yield ourselves to him and what he wants to teach us. Oswald Chambers tells us “joy means the perfect fulfillment of that for which I was created and regenerated.”
Are you willing to yield yourself to God so that like Helen, you can become all he’s created you to be?
