I see

A recent Newsweek book review, Invisible by Hugues de Montalembert, was another reminder that pain can lead to compassion.  That Jesus often works through wounded healers. Here is that story.

Thirty years ago, de Montalembert was enjoying life in New York City as a painter and a filmmaker when he burst in on two thieves trashing her apartment.  One of them threw paint remover in his face.  By the next morning, the 35-year-old artist was totally blind.  He plunged as deeply into despair as he did into the darkness that greeted him each morning when he awoke in the hospital after dreaming that he could see.

Times of adjustment followed.  Pain and change. Friends vanished, new friends were made.  De Montalembert resumed his world travel - Bali, India, Himalayas, writing and romance.

"The fact that I lost my sight is very spectacular," he says, "but there are things which are much more terrible."

In Paris one day, a Cambodian taxi driver extended his sympathy for de Montalembert's obvious plight.  The author thanked him but remarked that there were "people much more wounded than me."  The cabbie was silent and then said that his wife and children had been killed before his eyes in Cambodia.  "So there he was driving his cab in Paris with this huge wound that nobody could see." Except, of course, for the man who was blind.

Newsweek, February 15, 2010, page 53.

Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place.  2 Chronicles 7:15