He asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?” He said, “Lord, I want to see again.”
ó Luke 18:41
The morning started just like any other for my friend Wendy.
She was 26, recently divorced, living alone, getting ready to go to her job as a legal secretary.
She was curling her bangs.
“The curling iron just slipped off and hit me in the left eye,” she says.
She’s legally blind in her right. It was her “good eye.”
“It felt like someone had hit me,” Wendy says. “I didn’t feel much pain.”
She lived 20 minutes away from her dad and stepmom in Jacksonville, Fla. She called her dad, and started to cry. In a few moments, she couldn’t even open her injured eye.
“Daddy comes to get me and I’m just a mess,” Wendy says.
When the emergency room physician pried open her eye, it looked like the white part of an egg ó after it’s been fried.
Her father and the doctor gasped.
The doctor called his personal ophthalmologist, who just happened to be a plastic surgeon, too. That physician was at the airport, getting ready to go out of town on vacation with his family. He sent them on, and went to the hospital to see Wendy.
He put drops in her eye ó “goop” she calls it ó bandaged it and left to join his family.
“When I come back, we’re going to have to take that eye,” he told her.
It was a horrible week for Wendy. The eye hurt whenever it moved. She couldn’t sleep.
“It was very painful,” she says. “I would sit and cry and cry and cry.”
Her stepmother’s church put her on the prayer list.
“Women came over and started praying over me,” Wendy says. “It was just a steady stream. For the whole week, they just prayed and prayed and prayed. It was a wonderful feeling to feel cared for and loved.”
The trepidation came when Wendy wondered what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She wouldn’t be able to drive, read, use a computer.
Wendy returned to the ophthalmologist on Friday. He took off the bandages.
Then he looked at her and said, “It’s a miracle. I have absolutely no way to describe what’s happened.”
Wendy eventually regained the original vision she had in that eye.
“Prayers were answered,” she says, there’s just no two ways about it. “Things were happening for a purpose. I knew I didn’t understand, but I knew everything was going to be OK.”
Wendy, now 46, lives with her husband Jeff, also 46, and their son Matthew, 9, in Jacksonville.
Because of the severity of her case, curling irons now carry labels warning about eye injury.
Wendy and I met up at Lutheridge, where she shared this story. We marveled about how the passage we studied in Luke about Jesus and the blind man still rings true today.
“Anything’s possible,” Wendy says. “If you pray for what you want, and you have faith, everything will be OK.
“It was truly a miracle.”
nnn
Contact Susan Shinn at 704-797-4289 or sshinn@salisburypost.com.