Born Without Eyes
Marguita Clevenger

I was too young to remember, but I have heard the story so often. Even the details are vivid. I want to tell it as it has been told to me and is in my memory.

I was born without eyes. I was the little girl my father had always dreamed of, and he could hardly bear that burden. He was completely depressed every time he looked at me. He was not a Christian, and his only hope was if a doctor could do something to give me my sight.

In desperation and mixed with expectation, he and my grandmother traveled with me to Joplin, Missouri, to see Dr. Tom Post, an eye specialist. My father begged him, “Please, don’t think about the expense. I will do any work I can get, with anything I can get, just so my little girl can see.” The doctor examined me carefully and turned to my father with great sympathy and said, “No doctor can do anything here. The child has empty eye sockets. My advice to you is to save your money and accept the fact that you have a blind daughter." Dr. Post squeezed Father's hand and followed him to the door while Grandma took care of me. My father came home in agony and pain.

But for my mother it was not an agonizing time. She was a Christian who loved God and trusted Him. She quietly and calmly accepted that God had allowed this on purpose. As she was leaving with the child, God had given her a dream about the unborn child. In the dream, the child was a girl, but the child's face had a blank space instead of eyes. Mother knew that I would be born blind. But she who so quietly accepted my blindness never believed that I would remain blind. My mother read her Bible constantly and it created a wholehearted faith expectation that God would heal me.

A week after we visited the doctor, she asked my father to do her a favor. Could he and Grandma take me to a tent evangelist who was visiting so that he could pray for me. Her faith was so great that she expected Father to bring me home with eyes that were healed.

I came back to her the same way I had before, and if she was discouraged, it didn’t last long. There was a moist accumulation in my eye sockets that had to be constantly washed away so that my eye sockets wouldn’t stick together. Mother had such a certainty in her heart that God would help that every time she opened an eyelid to wash it, she expected to find a miracle.

One day when I was seven weeks old, my mother was sitting at the old kitchen table with me in her arms. She dipped a cotton ball in sterile water and began to rinse my eyelids backwards. This time something was different. When the glue was gone from the eyelid and it opened, a new brown eye shone toward her. My mother’s heart rejoiced and praised God and she started with the other eyelid. There was a new brown eye there too. She praised God over and over again. Then she sent for my father, who was at work, and begged him to please come home at once. He came rushing through the door, and my mother put me in his arms. I smiled at him, they say, and opened my eyes.

For the first time in his life, my father bowed before God and praised Him. From that day on he knew that God was working in his life, and he finally surrendered himself to his Savior, Jesus.

My father immediately took me back to the doctor in Joplin. He held me before Dr. Post and began to explain. As tears streamed down the doctor's face, he said, "You don't have to explain to me what happened to this baby. No human doctor could have done this, but God, who can do all things, has performed a miracle. Your baby has perfect eyes."

He told my father that he had been a personally convinced Christian, but during his medical studies he had drifted away from God. He had always planned to come back to God, but had found it too busy and difficult. “Now,” he confessed, “God speaks to me and I cannot reject Him any longer.” A month later, Dr. Post died unexpectedly of a heart attack, but he was ready to meet his Creator.

It is difficult for many to explain a miracle. As it was in apostolic times, so it should be today. The purpose of a miracle is to cause men and women to praise the name of God and receive Jesus as their Savior. But it is done by faith.

I am grateful for the perfect vision I have today and for a Bible-reading mother who believed in the power of prayer and expected a miracle from God.