From Kathy Clayton and her book “Teaching to Build and Faithfulness”:
A young woman was a promising student in every way. Her parents and teachers applauded her natural intellect and personal tenacity that marked her academic progress from an early age. They celebrated her 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 to her friend’s home on an ATV after attending her first rodeo.The road was wet from a recent rainstorm. As Lindsey and her driver rounded a bend the vehicle slipped off the side of the road and catapulted Lindsey into the bottom of a ravine. She was knocked unconscious and remained in 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 been with her in the classroom, she learned how to sit up, swallow, speak, walk, use her hands, and process information. That brave girl took the best of what she still had and applied it in 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 was 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 back with recrimination or regret. Some things neither Lindsey nor her parents could change, but many things could be positively affected by optimistic, forward-looking people who accepted what could not be changed and maximized 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 their’s to exercise. Those teachers, both those formally assigned to Lindsey and the informal ones who included her parents, parted with a futile desire to control what could not be controlled, assessed the present reality and turned with resolute grit to the teaching the task at hand. Their faith 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 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 acknowledges that her studies are much more challenging for her than they had been before her accident. Assignments take more time and greater focus for her to achieve a satisfactory result, but even as she shares that reality, she adds that her 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 walk and swallow 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) p. 49-51
