Why Can't We Be Like Helen Keller

Make me know Your ways, O LORD; Teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth and teach me, For You are the God of my salvation; For You I wait all the day. Psalms 25:4-5

We've all heard of Helen Keller, the girl who went blind and deaf after a sickness when she was around 18 months old. For most of her childhood, Helen could not communicate with other people until her teacher, Anne Sullivan, came and taught her how to finger spell words, understand processes, and speak.

I'm a psychology major at the university I attend and I was reading an article that was by Helen Keller that described how she learned and how she felt when she learned. She learned by first mimicking Anne Sullivan and then later, the things she was learning started to click in her brain and she started understanding rather than just mimicking. When I read this article, I had a weird question come to my head. Why can't we all be like Helen Keller?

In no way am I diminishing the struggles and hardships that Helen had to go through to become the intelligent woman that we was. That's the thing though, Helen Keller was never unintelligent. She just couldn't communicate or understand yet. That's kind of how I feel currently, in a spiritual sense. I'm a senior in college and just picked out all my classes for my last undergraduate semester, but I feel like I'm walking through life like Helen Keller. I can't really see where I'm going and I can't really hear anything that's going on around me, much less do I understand it all. I'm just stumbling around continuously thinking, "what do I do?" I fail to realize that I have an Anne Sullivan.

I feel like most of us know that. God teaches us. God guides us. It's been hammered in our brain for forever, but do we actually trust what we've been taught? Do we let God take us by the hand and finger spell words that we don't understand? Do we mimic His ways until we understand what we are doing?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say for the most of us the answer is a big, resounding no. We say we are letting God guide us, but we're somewhere in the wilderness stumbling around trying to figure out our own plan for our lives and understandably, still not knowing what in the world we are doing.

Why can't we all be like Helen Keller? Why can't we all learn like Helen Keller? Why can't we all trust like Helen Keller? Helen never lost her identity to her teacher. Helen was always Helen, but she grew up to be a very significant person and figure because of her teacher who enhanced her identity. Helen was never dumb. She just knew who to follow.