From Kathy K. Clayton’s book ‘Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness’:
A young friend was a promising student in every way. Her parents and her teachers applauded the natural intellect and personal tenacity that marked her academic progress from an early age. They celebrated the bright future she would surely have as a capable contributor. Circumstances abruptly altered that bright young woman’s trajectory and robbed her, figuratively speaking, of a pink crayon or whatever color would have been her undoubted favorite for creating her personal masterpiece.. Lindsey was returning the short distance from her friend’s on an ATV after attending her first rodeo. The road was wet from a previous rainstorm. As Lindsey and her driver rounded a bend, the vehicle slipped off the side of the road and catapulted into the bottom of a ravine. She was knocked unconscious and remained in a comatose state for two weeks.
When she finally awakened, on her father’s birthday, she began the arduous task of recovering the skills that had been compromised by her head trauma. Applying the tenacity that had served her well in the classroom, she relearned how to sit up, swallow, speak, walk and use her hands, and process information. The brave girl took the best of what she had still had and applied it to the strenuous undertaking of learning to do old things in new ways. There may not have been a pink crayon in her basket anymore, but there were still crayons, and she determined to go on drawing.
At the same time her parents and teachers learned to support and influence Lindsey for good in her new circumstances without looking backward with recrimination or regret. Some things neither Lindsey nor the people who loved her could change, but many things could be positively affected by optimistic, forward-looking people who accepted what could not be changed and maximized the the opportunities latent in the things that could. The task of her teachers became that of dealing with her new reality without wasting time wishing for a control that was not theirs to exercise. Those teachers, both the ones formally assigned to Lindsey and the informal ones, including her parents, parted with a futile desire to control what could not be controlled, assessed the present reality, and turned that resolute grit to the teaching task at hand. Their and realistic embrace of the circumstances that were beyond their control facilitated LIndsey’s miraculous recovery
After a yearlong detour from the academic route Lindsey had thought she would take, she graduated from Brigham Young University and has begun work on a master’s degree in communication disorders at an Arizona university. Without bitterness she freely acknowledges that her studies are much more challenging for her than they had been before the accident. Assignments take more time and greater focus for her to achieve satisfactory results, but even as she shares that reality she adds that here personal struggle affords her a measure of compassion for those she works with in her internship, a compassion she would not likely have achieved without her personal experience. Her own struggle to learn to talk and swallow again has equipped her with an understanding that she has allowed to work for the good of others. ~Kathy K. Clayton, Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness: (Salt Lake City,; Deseret Book, 2012) 49-51
