The Blind Boy Who Taught the Sighted to Read

In 1824, fifteen-year-old Louis Braille sat in a Paris dormitory at the Royal Institute for the Blind, pressing a stylus into paper. He had lost his sight at age three after an accident in his father's leather workshop. Now, using a similar pointed tool, he was creating a system of raised dots that would unlock literacy for blind people everywhere.

The irony cut deep. The sighted administrators at the Institute — the very people charged with educating the blind — rejected Braille's system for decades. They preferred their own method: oversized embossed letters that sighted teachers could read but blind students found nearly impossible to use. The administrators could see the pages yet couldn't recognize the breakthrough right before them. Meanwhile, blind students passed Braille's pages secretly among themselves, reading and writing with a fluency their teachers refused to acknowledge.

France didn't officially adopt his system until two years after Braille's death in 1852.

In John 9, Jesus heals a man born blind, and the Pharisees — who claimed to see most clearly — couldn't recognize the work of God standing right before them. The healed man saw it plainly. Sometimes those most certain they see everything are the most deeply blind, while those the world dismisses perceive what matters most. As Jesus Himself warned, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains."