Dear Friends,

I would like to introduce you to a dear friend called John who attended my previous church. He discovered in his thirties that he was going blind and when I got to know him when he was heading towards seventy, he had a trained guide dog to accompany him. When that dog got to the age of twelve, he was retired and went to live with someone else and John got a new dog.

I used to accompany him on his initial walks with the dog, and it was fascinating to see how the two worked together, the dog could see obstacles but was reliant on John to know approximately where they were and where they wanted to go. He told me stories about the time when the dog saved his life. It wouldn’t go forward on one regular walk and John got angry; however, then he could feel this large vehicle moving past him very close and he realised that the dog had seen this issue, that which had been unoccupied land was now being built on. It reminded me a little of Balaam’s adventure with his donkey recorded in Numbers 22 v 21-35!

I was thinking of John again recently: a man full of grace, who never complained even though he was become deaf as well as blind, and I was thinking of the parallels with the believer’s walk with Jesus. A blind person walking with a guide dog is not helpless — they are guided. They trust the one who can see. The dog sees obstacles, finds the safest route, and sometimes even refuses dangerous commands. The Christian life is similar. We walk through a world we cannot fully see or understand, but we follow Jesus — the one who sees clearly. Faith is not stumbling alone in the dark. It is learning to walk with the One who knows the way.

God bless you, David