Sermon Illustrations

I do not know if Louis Braille was a believer, but his life is an example of a sovereign God causing all things to work together for good - In the French Academy of Science there is a rather plain, old shoemaker's awl on display. The story behind the awl is quite extraordinary. To look at it, one would never suspect that this simple tool could be responsible for anything of consequence. In fact, it caused tremendous pain. This was the awl that one day fell from the shoemaker's table and put out the eye of the shoemaker's 9-year-old son. The injury was so severe that the boy lost vision in both eyes and was enrolled in a special school for children who were blind. The boy learned to read by handling large, carved-wood blocks. When the shoemaker's son became an adult, he thought of a new way to read. It involved learning a system of dots translated into the letters of the alphabet that could be read from a piece of paper on any flat surface. Louis Braille actually used the awl which had blinded him as a boy to form the dots into a whole new reading system for the blind—known today as Braille.

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