The Travel Writer

continued

little dubiously at this northerner the Dean's son had thrust upon them. Never, however, did Mother and Dad Sherrill make me feel an outsider. My ignorance of their world of church and seminary, my total lack of domestic skills -- the sewing, cooking, entertaining at which John's mother excelled -- must have alarmed them. But they embraced me from the start as a second daughter. I know today that this grafting of me into another family was a preview of an even more tremendous inclusion -- the believer's welcome into the family of God. And inherent in this hint of things to come was the fact that Dad Sherrill was blind.

John had told me about being summoned to camp headquarters during his basic training in Texas, six years earlier, to learn that his father's eyesight was failing. From Camp Wolters he'd been granted a week's "compassionate leave" to allow his father to see him a final time.

I'd wondered how a blind man could continue teaching, but Dad's scholarship never slacked. I would come upon him in an unlit room, his fingers tracing the lines on a big Braille page. Because he believed his blindness would be a distraction in the lecture hall, he would stand at the lectern turning the pages of a book he couldn't see, calling on his exceptional memory for long verbatim passages. Once when I'd written an article about him, I received an irate letter from a seminarian who'd studied under Dad in the early 1950s, accusing me of lying about the blindness.

Certainly he seemed to see. He never failed to say something complimentary about my appearance. "You're looking so pretty today!" Or, "What a lovely outfit!"

Even now I have trouble believing that Dad never saw me. He did see me, an inner voice insists. He saw me and I was beautiful! And of course in a sense he did see me -- looked at me through the lens of his love. Saw as we're seen in heaven. Saw the beauty of his own spirit and accounted it mine.