The lights are fading. I feel my heartbeat increase. Soon we will be in total darkness. I scan the small room, glancing at the others’ faces in the waning light. They look like apparitions hovering in a deep, nocturnal sky—barely visible against the charcoal-hued drapes hanging along the walls behind them. The ten of us—my wife and I, and eight strangers—sit in a horseshoe pattern with white, red-tipped canes extended before our seats. Blackness swallows the room, and we quietly sit in its fearsome belly. I remove my glasses and place them in my coat pocket. Corrective lenses will do me no good. For the next hour, I will be blind.
We have given up our sight to participate in Dialog in the Dark1—a total immersion experience into the world of the sightless. Since the organization’s inception in 1988, Dialog has exposed more than five million people in 22 countries to “seeing” the world with their other senses. Visitors to the exhibition are led through the dark into mock real-world scenarios—grocery stores, cafés, and city streets—by blind or visually impaired guides.
I push my fingers through the looped cord at the top of my cane and let it slide over my wrist, feeling now a little anxious as I stand—as if waiting at the edge of an abyss. I hear our guide call out to us to begin walking, repeating the words, “I’m right here, come to the sound of my voice,” almost rhythmically, until each of us has found the corridor. Having trained for 9 days, our guide has the exhibition’s floor plan memorized. I feel the air to my right displace as he walks past to greet the coming line at the next door.
My eyes are open, but I see nothing. I feel them search the darkness for a point of focus—something, anything visible. Spots of residual light swirl in and out of view before me as my retinas purge the last of the seen world. With one hand on what feels like a plywood wall, I let my cane held in the other slide back and forth across the ground as I walk through the otherwise formless passageway.
I hear our guide again at the end of the hall now, chanting his refrain, “Come to my voice; I’m right here.”
*
I am taking small, careful steps through the first room of the exhibit—an indoor park replete with grass, trees, and shrubs. I know this only by touch, nearly tripping, and banging my shins on wrought iron benches and trash cans. Members of the group call out the items they find at our guide’s request, tapping their canes against every surface. We sound like a house full of children beating wooden spoons against pots and pans. I bump into a fellow group member—my wife, as it happens, and I am thankful to have found her after we lost each other in the initial confusion. Our guide instructs the group again to follow him. We stand there, the two of us, allowing the others to find their way before making our own attempt. I rest my hand on her shoulder for a moment, feeling both surprised and comforted by the familiarity of its contour, and the heat radiating from her body.
I wonder at the thought of never seeing her face again—the lift of her eyes as she laughs at a good joke, her quiet tears at the sight of something beautiful or moving—the multitude of small joys held within her very image. I would lose the subtleties of her movements and expressions—those things that I have come to rely upon so heavily in knowing and loving her these few, wonderful years. Would I come, instead, to recognize a previously undetected lilt in her speech, the slightest variation in her embrace and its meaning?
My mind turns to majestic things: the created world—mountains and hillsides, open fields and rolling seas. What would it be to never see the ocean waves crumble on the sand or recede again into the deep; the fall of brilliant, autumn leaves—a fiery mosaic scattered across the lawn; the sunset horizon painted in strokes of sweeping pinks, blues, and reds; or the gentle limbs of springtime trees bowing in the wind to passersby?
What is the world without all of this color and texture? What is this life in the absence of light?
“This is a crate full of gourds,” I say to myself, running my hands again over their fluted, bumpy skins. I move forward letting one hand drag along the surface of what I’ve discovered to be the vegetable stand of our second room—the grocery store. My fingers pass over corn and baskets of loose beans. I lift a handful to my nose. It’s coffee.
“Here’s the freezer section,” shouts a woman. I hear the rest of the group shuffle her way to open and close the refrigerator doors. But I continue moving, my hand now beyond the baskets and on to a rack full of newspapers and magazines. I feel nothing but the smoothness of the paper, the hard edge of the magazines’ bindings. I wonder what each says—what pictures adorn their front pages and covers, what I might learn. For a moment, I understand the pain of not knowing. And there’s no one to read to me.
*
Jennifer Rothschild knows what it is to live in darkness.She’s a singer, author, and motivational speaker who became blind at the age of 15. Jennifer suffers from retinitis pigmentosa—a degenerative eye disease that causes retinal dystrophy. Over time the eyesight of the afflicted individual worsens, eventually resulting in complete blindness. Thirty years later, Jennifer sees only small amounts of bright light she refers to as “whitewash” and “not useful.” She has never seen her husband Phil or her two sons Clayton and Conner. But she isn’t angry. She thinks of her blindness as a welcome opportunity to know her frailty as a human being.
“We’ve all got it,” she told me recently. “And we do a disservice to ourselves when we don’t acknowledge and live in our weakness. What that does is keep us from experiencing the depth of strength that comes from our relationship with the Lord. As the apostle Paul articulated, God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness (
2 Cor. 12:9). So blindness has been an occasion—a constant occasion—for me to be acquainted with my weakness, and at the same be stunned by God’s strength.”
For Jennifer, blindness isn’t something to regret or bewail, but is a tool for growing into the likeness of Christ—a path to spiritual transformation, a more profound wholeness. Physical healing is only a second thought—she’d rather strive for contentment, wanting to place full confidence in the Lord—attaining what she calls the deeper gifts. “I so trust God’s character and His heart that [I know] He would not allow something in my life if it were not for my ultimate good and His glory. So I use my [blindness] as a bridge in my life that connects me to Him, rather than get angry and bitter and turn it into a wall that separates us.”
Visual impairment has yielded unexpected blessings in Jennifer’s life and ministry. “God has used blindness as a way to position me for greater ministry,” she explained. “I would never say that God couldn’t have done what He has without blindness, because I know He could. But from my point of view—on this human plane—I can’t imagine it. I see how my condition has opened doors to minister; without it, I don’t know that I would have the ability to be as effective at getting into people’s hearts. That’s a gift, because blindness can be very isolating. But, for me, God has allowed it to be that which connects me deeply to Him and other people.”
For this woman, going blind has meant learning to see.
*
We’re in the last stage of our tour. The ten of us have crammed into a circular booth in a lightless café and are asking our guide about his life as a visually impaired man. There, sitting in the blackness as the others speak, I say nothing, reflecting on the last hour of walking without sight.
I see that darkness is a fearful, imposing thing—not just for the blind, but for all of us. And it takes different forms in each of our lives. For some people, it’s questions of vocation; for others, belonging and love. Some of us dwell among piercing sorrows, and the subsequent doubts of whether or not God can hear our cries, whether He exists at all. Others are discontent with any lack of knowledge, not possessing the humility necessary to live in faith—uncomfortable as they are with any shred of mystery or shades of gray.
What job should I take? we ask. How will I pay for my house? Who will my children become? Often questions such as these live among those that affect us more deeply and painfully. Why did my loved one die? Will my marriage survive? Why hasn’t God healed me? And though we continue to ask and hope, the answers elude us. At times, God himself seems to elude us. We continue along what appears to be a lightless path. And sometimes, we fear walking at all.
We live in it every day, you and me—this darkness of unknowing. It is the unavoidable reality of our existence and will persist until the day we die. But it’s also by this darkness that we come to see the truth of who we really are: how little we’re capable of knowing and controlling in this life. And this is the grace of God.
As the prophet Micah wrote, “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (6:8) He uses our impairments—whether physical, mental, or emotional—to draw us to this place of submission and humility where we may receive, not the answer we’re looking for, but the one we need: the healing of our hearts.
As Jennifer Rothschild told me, “Sometimes God doesn’t remove the thorns in our lives—just as He didn’t for Paul. Sometimes He lets blindness or cancer remain. Sometimes He chooses to not heal, and I believe it’s out of His great mercy when He makes that choice. God used blindness to protect me from myself—from the potential I have to become prideful.”
There are times when the only understanding we have is like a sliver of moon in a cloud-spotted sky, or the distant sparkle of stars burning light-years away. But the promise of Scripture is that whatever darkness we face—one blindness or another—there is a light unseen by the physical eyes: the presence of God, the Holy Spirit. Though we think we walk alone, His gentle hand is there at our backs, guiding us always. As we travel through life’s challenges and sufferings, we come to see Him all the more clearly in the light of love. And at the end of our path, the Lord Jesus waits for us, calling out: “Come to My voice. I am right here.”
Blind since age 15, Jennifer Rothschild shares autobiographical sketches and poignant insights from her unique perspective in
Lessons I Learned in the Dark, available in our
online bookstore. Learn what it really means to live by faith instead of by sight—and how freedom and fulfillment are more than possible, even in the midst of adversity.
