Rhonda Johnson SINCE I LAID MY BURDEN DOWN In 1968 a three year old girl looked out from her back porch and imagined that if the houses across the alley weren't in the way she would be able to see around the world. In 1995 a doctor suggested that she get a white cane. Going through public school with a hidden, yet progressive, dual sensory loss which even I was not aware of created in me a heart of strength and resilience. It also created over a quarter century of buried rage and pain. I cannot know how much of the way people perceived me stemmed from some adult promulgation which all the other kids knew, but nobody, not even I, knew that I did not know. What is common sense? If you do not know about gravity common sense will tell you the world is flat. How can it be round? Everything would fall off. But if you know about gravity the same common sense will tell you the world must be round. If it were flat it could not stay in orbit. But common sense did not tell me the same things it told other people and I did not know why. I knew that if I thought no one understood me it would be taken as proof that I was a bad person who deserved to be hated by everyone. So I had no outlet for my feelings and by the time I reached the seventh grade I was well on my way to being the little monster everyone wanted and expected me to be. But that was not God's plan for my life. He brought me out of that city, which later became the murder capital of the world. I shudder thinking what might have happened to me if I had stayed there. Still, the old patterns followed me to the west coast. "Are you hard of hearing or are you dumb?" How could I explain to the other kids what I did not understand myself? But everybody understands dumb. Oh she's just dumb. No explanations are necessary. So I let it go at that. For the first twelve years of my adult life I struggled to remain functional in a slowly fading world. I keep a trampoline in a corner of my living room, ostensibly for exercise, but mostly to remind myself of what lies at the bottom of my despair. God, pain, anger and a buoyance to rise. I am not afraid. A righteous man falls seven times and rises again. That was B.C. Then Jesus came and raised the stakes to seventy times seven. I am not afraid of the first of the seventy first. I passed that long ago, and Daddy, I'm still rising. In the Summer of 1999 I was walking down Los Angeles street toward Union Station. The thrill of a recently earned graduate degree blurred in my mind as the smudge of treetops popped up in blotched clarity. I thought that if I lost all my vision I would not want to live. With no hearing and no sight what would be the point. Would it not be better to be retarded than to be a master swimmer who cannot float? In a moment the sidewalk curved in for the bus stop. I stumbled off the curb and found myself on my hands and knees in the busy downtown street. The way I scrambled back on the sidewalk I knew I did not want to die all that badly. I repented of despising the life that God has given me. For it is His life in me and He knows what he wants to do with it. He promised me that He would not allow me to be tried above my ability. I feel the touch of His honor that He does not think it above my ability to bear this heavy cross so that I can be a comfort and a strength to others, even through my weakness. I rise. Who are the others? I confronted God. "You told me to love people. But love is a verb, not an interjection, separated from life by an explanation point. How can I love people if I cannot see or hear them? How can I respond to their needs if I do not know their needs. There are five kinds of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, those who wonder what happened, those who make things happen and still wonder what happened and those who don't even know that anything has happened for them to wonder about. I am more often than not among the last three. The world and its realities are little more than abstractions and my own actions are seldom restrained by their effect on people who are barely real to me." I made my case–giving myself a hedge in case He didn't know how really unfair was this commandment to love . His answer was very simple. "How do you love Me? You have never seen Me or heard Me with your natural senses. Am I little more than an abstraction? Am I real to you?" But He did not mock my pain nor despise my tears. He was not afraid to touch the inflamed heart and the burning core of anger. He opened a door in my life–wonderful and unexpected–under the surgeon's knife. He created a bionic woman who makes the alarms go off at the airport and is astonished at every new thing. For a week after cochlear implant surgery I had recurrent dreams of murder as if my mind knew that a change was coming into my life as drastic as death–the death of the person I had been, the life I had lived and the coping strategies I had perfected. I had read stories of people who were able to use the phone the first day their outside equipment was turned on. I just knew I was going to be one of those people, but on my first day I was more than disappointed. I was appalled. I could not even distinguish speech from other sounds. I got an audio book and practiced listening. By the third day I could distinguish speech but it sounded like everyone was speaking in tongues. The consonants, which are higher pitched than vowels, are the first to go in deafness and the last to come back after implantation. It's the consonants that give words meaning and without them we hear but do not understand what people say. I was determined to hear again, but I had to learn to trust sound. As I became deaf and blind my brain transferred responsibility for receiving the information that my ears and eyes had given me to my fingers. I could actually hear sound through my fingers. When I touched someone I felt as if I knew them–as if we were having a long heart to heart conversation. Now that I can really talk to people, I find that I have less desire to touch them. Sudden memories–slow but exponential–energy converges into a little hole then explodes in recaptured life.