Blessed are those that weep………For they will see new life.

When you experience weeping and grief, you grow.  You have a new appreciation for things that have happened from you and you often learn about yourself.  From grief, we learn to see experiences in a new light.  Perhaps through your grief experience, you’ve come to appreciate things differently.  I did.  I lost my hearing when I was 12.  I was desperately seeking the answer to “why” in the middle of my illness and disease.  It took me several years to process the grief to where I saw growth and learned new things about myself.

I recall reading John Milton’s On Blindness as a part of my English class in high school.  Much like the kids around me, I was bored with the yapping of the teacher and I often spent more time in my thoughts than paying attention in class.  But this poem jumped out at me.

Milton’s words inspired me to write my own poem. I recall vividly trying to capture my thoughts on my hearing loss mirroring Milton’s poetic cadence with my words.  I share my poem, the cadence of my new insights, with you today so that you know that good things do grow out of bad and you will not weep forever.

On Deafness (Courie, 1992, 2014)

Deafness means to be without sound
And yet I seem to hear
A noise that levels mountains, and calms the frighten deer
A song that sings without voices
A Beethoven-like symphony
That echoes, echoes, echoes, in my quiet ear
A forfeit I felt for such a small while, was soon lost in a beauty I was now to see
A soundless life-vibrance, a hearing person would never presume.
They think that I miss out, and sometimes I do
But a loss that brought a gift so fair
Makes my deafness hard to rue
When a different sound came to me, that never before I knew.

Anna Fitch Courie is an army wife, nurse, layperson, and the author of several books, including the “Christ Walk” series from Church Publishing and the Sally the Comet books from CreateSpace. Anna finds her calling where health and spirituality intersect.  Anna is a registered nurse and worked in health care for the past twenty years. More recently, she has been a consultant on building community coalitions on health. Anna is a graduate of Clemson University, the University of Wyoming, and Education for Ministry at Sewanee: the University of the South. She is currently enrolled at Ohio State University in the Doctoral in Nursing Practice program. Home is wherever the Army (and God) sends her.  You can find her blog at Christ Walk (www.christwalk40day.blogspot.com); on facebook at www.facebook.com/Christwalk40day; on twitter @christwalk1 and on Instagram @christwalk1.