Seeing Love At Work

I’ve been in California with Mr. J. We went for two reasons; first, he had a conference in Berkeley and second, one of our grandsons was being baptized. Mr. J has been going to these Intellectual Property conferences for years and has become good friends with many of the people who attend from other universities, so on Friday night we went to dinner with one of them. I had met Mr. B only one time before, but have heard Mr. J talk about him often. Therefore, it was a delight for me to be with him and find out for myself that all the wonderful things Mr. J has told me about him are true.

Mr. B. has a nine-year-old daughter that is severely handicapped. She is blind, deaf, and confined to a wheel chair, but it is a long way into any conversation with him that you find that out and then only because you become a little confused and start to ask questions. Mr. B. doesn’t talk about the handicap; instead he talks about how his daughter has blessed his life and the life of his family. He stresses how she brings out the best in other people. He talks about the incredible experiences they have had traveling with her and the people they’ve met because of her handicap—how people are drawn to her.

As the evening wore on and I began to see the whole picture, that the “angel” he was talking about still wore diapers, had to be fed, couldn’t communicate with language, etc. I was amazed. Never once did he come even close to a complaint or a disparaging word. Instead he chuckled as he told us how they had learned to communicate, marveled over all he had learned from the experience, and with as much love and pride as a father whose daughter had just been crowned Miss America showed us pictures of how surgeries had lifted the bone structure of her face and changed her appearance.

I came away from our evening together so uplifted and touched. Newspapers are full of all that is wrong in our world, but Friday night I experienced all that is good and beautiful in human beings. I tasted heaven.