The Evidence of Things Not Seen

If you knew you were going blind tomorrow, what would you make an effort to see today? An eagle soaring? Or maybe waves crashing on the beach? Certainly you would drink in the smiles of your children, memorizing their faces to help you through the dark days to come. 

Billy had no such warning, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have had any such list.  

Billy was the son of an unwed mother who died in childbirth. He had spent the first thirteen years of his life in forgettable foster homes and most of the next seventeen years on the streets of New York. If you asked him why he chose the name Billy, he would tell you that William seemed too formal and that no one likes Bills. In truth, what name he went by wasn’t important because he had no family and no real friends.

Lest you think I am here to tell you Billy was a saint, I can assure you he was not. He was a thief, an addict, and a drug dealer. Billy wasn’t even old enough to drive the first time he was arrested and hadn’t yet voted the first time he was incarcerated. No one cared about Billy, and he didn’t care right back. 

He fought everyone and everything in his life, and most times he lost. He carried a gun with him wherever he went, and it’s only by the grace of God that he never ended another person’s life. 

What would you make an effort to see if you were going blind tomorrow? Billy didn’t have the chance to make a list because, as in most cases of sudden blindness, he didn’t see it coming. 

The details aren’t worth rehashing—it is enough to know that the incident occurred during a drug deal gone bad. You see, Billy wasn’t the only one who always carried a gun. 

The bullet that changed Billy’s life entered his cheekbone at a slightly upward angle. It instantly destroyed his right eye and severely damaged the tissue and nerves behind his left. One eye was removed during surgery, and the other was useless. Billy was left totally blind.  

When Billy woke up to darkness, he wasn’t angry that he was blind; he was angry that he was alive.  

Then Billy met Kay. If this was a predictable movie, Kay would have been a beautiful young doctor with whom Billy found everlasting love. We all know that's not the case. 

Kay was a cantankerous old nurse with a raspy smoker's voice and cold bony fingers. She had no bedside manner, and she didn’t suffer fools gladly. To her, Billy was a fool. 

She never told him he was lucky to be alive. She thought that was too obvious to waste her breath. She, however, gruffly told him he was lucky to be blind. I know she might sound cruel, but Kay was also the only one who regularly visited him. 

It was more than three weeks after he woke up before Billy realized the anomaly. Kay worked five days a week, but she came in the other two just to see Billy. Those who worked with Kay will tell you she never did anything like that before Billy or afterwards.

She was the first person who ever authentically cared about Billy, although you’d never know it by how she treated him. She called him lazy when he wouldn’t get up and try to walk. She called him a coward when he refused to meet with a social worker. She called him an imbecile when he would confide in her his desire to die. 

Before the hospital, Billy had no reason to try to turn his life around, but he found a very powerful one after the accident: his overwhelming desire to shut Kay up.

Billy spent twelve weeks in the hospital and rehab, just shy of three months. Miraculously, other than being stone cold blind, Billy had been unharmed by the bullet. When he finally left, with Kay’s help and annoying encouragement, he was able to move into a halfway house. The structure was critical to his physical recovery and his journey towards sobriety. 

Had Billy been able to see the sign over the door to his new home, he would have seen the halfway house’s mission statement: “Rebuilding lives, one soul at a time.” Billy, however, was careful to avoid using the phrase, as before the accident he had no life worth rebuilding.

Not long after he arrived at his new digs, a funny thing happened to Billy. He became both a celebrity of sorts and the living embodiment of encouragement. Everybody in the house wanted to hear the story of the man who was shot in the head and lived to tell about it. It was also hard for any of the other residents to feel sorry for themselves because no one had it as bad as Billy. 

Billy was supposed to be in the halfway house for three months. Ninety days is a long time when you’re trying to hold your breath, but devastatingly short when it means facing a world you can no longer see. Whereas other residents counted the minutes until the court would allow them to leave, Billy found the approaching end of his stay overwhelming. 

It wasn’t until years later that Billy found out Kay had been working behind the scenes to get him a job as a lay counselor at the very halfway house he was dreading to leave. 

Most people think they are never touched by miracles. The reason is that those same people think all miracles are large production numbers accompanied by songs of angels, but the truth is most important miracles are small and happen every day. 

It’s a little known fact that someone who has an eye removed can still produce tears if the ducts remain intact. If Billy didn’t know this already, he learned it the day he experienced his miracle. It came quietly when he was offered a job that would allow him to stay and work with residents as they re-entered society. 

Billy was thirty years old the day he received his first actual paycheck, and that paycheck, still uncashed, can be found in his Bible to this day.

Over the next few years, Billy did more than just work at the halfway house. He devoted himself to its transient residents. 

"When you lose your sight," Billy would say, "you see things others don't." There was no time, day or night, that Billy was unavailable to listen or give advice, or even offer a much needed hug. The man who spent his life caring for no one now cared for everyone.

Billy worked hard to master the use of his cane, becoming so proficient that he didn’t need a seeing eye dog. He didn’t need one, but he got one all the same. 

Billy also found love, just not with Kay. He was in a supermarket looking for tomatoes, and, just as he was wont to do, he asked the closest person to help him select the finest two. 

That’s when he met Millie. Yes, Billy and Millie. Outsiders chuckle at the coincidence, but those of us here know it was more like destiny. Millie, as it turns out, had a servant's heart and was more than happy to help with the tomato dilemma, and she took an instant liking to Billy. 

The day before he met Millie was the last day of his life he spent apart from her. They went for coffee and dinner and talked until today became tomorrow. Billy always said he could see voices, and then he’d turn to Millie and say hers was the most beautiful one in the world. 

Less than a year later, they were married. Billy, for the first time in his life, moved into a home of his own. They had three children, two daughters and a son. They never got rich, but they spent their lives helping others.

If you ever asked Billy or Millie how many people they helped over the years, they would always say just one. It was their way of giving each wayward soul their full attention. Whenever they had the chance and the money, they would travel to see the sights of the world: Millie with her eyes and Billy through Millie’s descriptions.

If the question was ever asked if one person can change the world, anyone who knew either would answer quickly and enthusiastically—yes. 

If you knew you were going blind tomorrow, what would you make an effort to see today? 

If it were me, I would want to see that young man who shot Billy so I could tell him, from Billy, he was forgiven. 

I would want to see Kay, so I could hug her and tell her thanks for loving Billy enough to change his life.

I would want to be here today to see something no one thought possible forty years ago: a church overflowing with Billy’s family and friends.  

Legacy is a word over and misused. But not in Billy’s case. Millie is his legacy. My sisters are his legacy. I am his legacy, and all of you are his legacy. We are all proof of what my dad always said about life: it’s not how you start, but how you finish.

My dad lived his life in darkness until he lost his sight. It was then, and only then, that he finally saw the light.