This Week's Story
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Brian Blair, born blind, experiences doing what he had thought was impossible for him to do.
This Week’s Story relives American history and the Bible through brief inspiring stories presented on mp3 audio recordings and text for reading.
A Foxhole Is Not My Home,
part three
Brian’s mom looked at her sleeping son. A smile flickered across her face as she said, “I know you are blind. You’ve never seen green trees in the spring, but you have life!
“You will not have a foxhole mentality. Soldiers may need a foxhole for safety, but it is not their home or yours.”
As Brian awoke, he listened to his mom. He had returned home after finishing sixth grade at Ohio State School for the Blind. It was important to his mom that he would not be sheltered from sighted people. He agreed with her. He was not going to hide.
He had a strong memory of an occasion his grandpa arranged when Brian was five years old. His grandpa while working at a hotel had met a successful blind business man, who travelled independently. His grandpa had asked the man, “Why don’t you come home and have dinner with us?”
He did and made a big impression on Brian. Brian felt: I can live a normal life!
When he returned to public school in Dayton, Ohio, he found it easy to do well in his studies and to use braille, which he had learned at the school for the blind. He tried to fit in with kids and adults. It was difficult! He was a seventh grader at a new school with new students and a knot in his stomach each morning.
He gradually found friends, rough-housed with them, rode bicycle, was in Boy Scouts, went camping, and got hurt sometimes. As he said later, “I tried to do things other kids do. I developed the idea that I could do things that at first seemed impossible for me to do.”
He had determination and tenacity!
He liked music and had taken a piano class at the state school for the blind. The braille music scores were frustrating and slow to use. In mid-second grade he began taking piano lessons and continued through the twelfth grade.
In eighth, ninth, and part of his tenth grade he wrestled. He admits, “I wasn’t great, but I stuck with it. We ran loops after school in the hallways of the high school. I could hear where things were by echoes. I did not use a cane.”
Brian described changes in his understanding of God. “When I was in kindergarten, a family had invited me to Sunday School. I was baptized, but I did not feel any change in myself. I went to Sunday School for several years.
“As I went through my junior year, I became rebellious. I questioned the existence of God. Life became depressing to me.
“A girl asked me to go to church with her. I heard the gospel message. I walked forward to the front of the church, because I wanted to accept what Jesus had done for me, when he died on the cross and arose from the dead. I was seventeen.
“My attitudes began changing. I was no longer in despair. I invited Mom to go to church. She became a Christian. My grandparents also did. I began to have an explosion of interests and ability.”
Soon Brian Blair’s story will conclude with part four.
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