Remember Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations? At twenty minutes to nine on her wedding day, while getting ready to walk down the aisle, she received a letter from her fiancé, learning that he had defrauded her. From that day on, Miss Havisham remained in her mansion as it decayed around her, wearing her wedding dress and a single shoe. The wedding cake lay uneaten on a big table in the middle of a banquet hall. She kept all the clocks stopped at twenty to nine. She was paralyzed in time at the worst moment of her life.
The book of Jeremiah describes the worst of times. Most of God’s people had been carried away into exile. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong when Jeremiah sent a letter to the surviving Jewish elders exiled in Babylon, expressing God’s intentions for them while they remained in exile. Forbidding paralysis in the worst moment of their lives, the letter soars with hope, calling for industry and good will:
Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.
Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you...Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper....When seventy years are completed...I will come to you and...bring you back...For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
In 1959, Lynn Campbell was a junior in high school in Boswell, Oklahoma. She came down to Fort Worth to stay with her aunt for the summer, landing a job in a candy factory. She had been working there for three weeks when she began to feel tired. The next week, she felt cramping in her legs, then a weakness in her neck. When she tried to get up, she collapsed. Two days later, Lynn, 17, was diagnosed with polio and placed in an iron lung, a huge pressurized device which allowed her to breathe. She would live reclined inside of it for the rest of her life.
A perfectly healthy young, vibrant teenager the week before, she was now a quadriplegic, trapped in a monstrous contraption in a dingy room previously used for storage in a hospital far from home. All alone except for five other “lungs,” as she called them, five other polio victims, she was literally paralyzed. It was the worst moment of her life.
Lynn was eventually transferred to Houston to the Texas Institute of Rehabilitation and Research (TIRR) to undergo something called occupational therapy. This, Lynn thought, sounded ridiculous. What would be the purpose? She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even breathe on her own. She later wrote this:
On my third day at TIRR, I was introduced to Miss Pat Bohannon. She would be my therapist. We were near the same age and our first session was merely conversation. Pat was from Oklahoma too...born in Hominy, a small town like Boswell. She asked me, “Do you have any future plans?”
I felt like telling her, “Yes, I had plans. Either walking or dying as soon as I could.” Instead, I tried to smile and said, “No. No plans.”
Pat told me that an impression would be taken of my mouth, then a mouthstick would be constructed. This would enable me to type or turn pages for myself while reading...As time passed, Pat became much more than just a teacher to me. We became friends. She began taking her coffee breaks with me every afternoon...She soon took me to my first try with a paint brush. Pat did a few quick sketches, dipped the mouthstick-held brush into water color and gave it to me. I hit the paper with it. This accomplishment I considered tremendous because, more than anything, I did it myself.
With the assistance of her friend and occupational therapist, Pat, (soon to be Pat Funderburk, my mother), Lynn Campbell learned to paint. She wrote a book about her life entitled Through a Glass Darkly. Despite her physical paralysis, Lynn became an art teacher, teaching hundreds of kids and adults to paint, and her work has been featured at art shows throughout the Midwest.
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
No matter what.
God, may we never be frozen in the worst of times. Amen.
