Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. (James 1:17)

Advent is the season of anticipation of a wonderful, and, indeed “good and perfect” gift. Sometimes we get sidetracked and focus on the “gifts” we will receive and give instead of the great gift of the Father to us all.

Before she started lessons with Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller recalled her life of utter chaos. She was subject to fits of great anger and destruction that she couldn’t understand, and that culminated in exhaustion. The darkness and the silence of her world afforded no relief. The light of communication and connection reshaped Helen Keller’s very existence. She wrote, The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched.–they must be felt with the heart.

Isaiah’s prophesy of the future coming of God’s son was felt in Isaiah’s heart in the midst of the disarray of his native country of Israel, and his words have stayed in the hearts of Christians for thousand’s of years: Unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given. (Isaiah 9:6) Helen Keller must have known Isaiah’s words in a deeper way than those of us with vision and hearing, for Isaiah also wrote, The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. (Isaiah 9:2)

The commercial world is sometimes so loud and flashy that it obscures the way to our hearts, especially at Christmas. Advent is a time to escape the noise and the flashiness as Helen Keller and Isaiah both escaped and experienced the great light that shows the way to Bethlehem. The blind and deaf woman who since infancy had never seen the light that she mentions so confidently, was herself a “good and perfect” gift to the world, and the prophet who had no source except God Himself, was a “good and perfect” gift to humankind. Both of them revealed a spiritual world of light and life to generations of people who saw evil and destruction around them. Helen Keller wrote,Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.

We, who find it difficult to “see” invisible things, the good and perfect gifts of God, can learn a great deal from these two, who could report what they “saw” in such a way that our eyes can open to the invisible, too. At Advent, God brings the light, when we bring our inner eyes.

Love in Him,

Prue