Helen Keller

(1880 – 1968)
A remarkable visionary that pursued the light even though denied physical light.
Even the darkness is not dark to Thee. Psalm 139:12 NASB

“Courage To Conquer Her World”
The two most interesting characters of the nineteenth century are Napoleon and Helen Keller.” That was the opinion that Mark twain voiced about Helen Keller when she was only fifteen years old. He reasoned that Napoleon failed to conquer his world as he intended, but Keller conquered hers. Keller traded in the titles of “blind, deaf, and mute” given to her as a child for the titles of scholar, philosopher, author, motion picture actress, traveler, lecturer, and winner of countless awards and accolades.
Born a normal child in everyway, Keller was diagnosed with “acute congestion of the stomach and brain” at nineteen months old and suffered a fever that took her to the brink of death. When the fever broke, the disease was gone but so were her abilities to see, hear and speak. Experts predicted a life “doomed to a void of eternal dark silence.”
Keller, however, refused to relinquish her curiosity about the world or her desire to communicate. Her attempts at communication prompted her to overturn the baby carriage in which her baby sister was sleeping and shortly thereafter, to catch her apron on fire by the family hearth. Alarmed by these behaviors, her parents sought help, including the counsel of Alexander Graham Bell. A year later, the search for a teacher ended when Anne Mansfield Sullivan became Keller’s mentor and friend and taught her to make an association with objects and letters that were “fingered” into her hand. Within months, Keller’s remarkable progress had attracted the interest of educators nationwide.
Unwilling to limit her communication to reading and writing Braille and “raised print”, Keller began to take speech lessons and eventually learned to speak not only English, but also French and German. She successfully completed courses on Latin, Greek, and Roman history, and she earned honors in English and German. In 1900, she entered Radcliffe College.
During her life, Keller lectured in every state of the union, speaking mainly on the needs of the blind and raising funds to help found the National Committee for the Blindness. She also helped create the American Foundation for the Blind. She wrote a number of books and essays, and she made a motion picture of her life. Somewhat ironically, one of the most famous quotes attributes to Keller is this: “keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.”
“Helen Keller,” wrote her friend Edward Everett Hale, a poet and teacher, “cannot see the written word in the stars, in the ocean, in the green grass, in the violet, or the dandelion. She cannot hear the spoken word in the song of the bluebird or the cricket or the peep frog or the thunder or the surf on the shore. But none the less she does know what the omnipotence of God is, what the infinite range of hope is, and what faith in the unseen is.”
Culled from You Can be a World Changer