One of Debbie Puffer’s earliest memories is walking into her fourth-grade class at a new school and the teacher saying, “This is our new student, Debbie, and she’s blind.”

Debbie fought back tears that day. She had never been called blind before, and she was mortified.

No doubt, Debbie (pictured left) knew she had problems with her vision. She has no distance vision, and the only thing she can see on the eye chart is the big E, so she is legally blind. In fact, when Debbie was in second grade at Our Lady of Victory Catholic school, Sister Joseph Mary realized Debbie couldn’t read, so she rented a large-print typewriter, retyped all of Debbie’s textbooks on wallpaper samples, and bound them in wallpaper sample books.

Debbie’s mother transferred her to public school in fourth grade because the schools provided large-print books, but the tradeoff was being “the blind girl.” Up until then, she had just seen herself as special because of how kind and caring people like Sister Mary Joseph had been to her.

As isolated and embarrassed as Debbie felt in that season and throughout her childhood, she tried to avoid feeling sorry for herself. It just didn’t feel appropriate, considering the way her mother was raising five kids after being abandoned by her husband when Debbie was born. So Debbie did everything she could to reduce her mom’s suffering, and it proved to be an effective distraction from Debbie’s own struggles.

But Debbie could not avoid the obstacles that came with her impaired vision over the years, and that especially came into focus in college. She had to go to each professor, talk about her eyesight, and ask for notes. And Debbie couldn’t read the print in the library’s card catalogue system, so her roommate had to accompany her anytime she went to the library for research projects.

Debbie met Frank Puffer in college, and they fell in love. To her joy and relief, he asked her to marry him just before he graduated, which not only brought the stress of college to an end but allowed her to move on with her life and start a family. Even so, her life was still defined by limits and losses that came with blindness.

One of the hardest things was not being able to do things one-on-one with her children. She longed to have mommy-and-me dates to the movies or to take her child to the pool, but she couldn’t drive, so she would always have to ask a neighbor to accompany her during those outings.

One day, when Debbie was in her sixties, a friend came over, and Debbie uncharacteristically opened up about her struggles with her eyesight. In response, her friend asked an innocuous question: “Do you clean your own house?”

Tears welled up in Debbie’s eyes, and she began sobbing, and her friend gently asked what was behind the tears.

“I guess I’m just tender when it comes to my eyesight.”

“I wonder,” said her friend, “if the Lord is inviting you to grieve the loss of your eyesight.”

That day, Debbie grieved her disability without shame. There were other painful memories that came back to her around that time, and with the encouragement of another friend, she found herself going back to the memories and imagining Jesus there with her. Sometimes she still does.

Not all the old memories were painful though. She recalled one time when Sister Joseph Mary said, “Where did you get that beautiful blond hair?” and Debbie remembers saying, with innocent childlike conviction, “Well, God gave it to me!”

While Debbie does not believe God gave her impaired vision in the same way that He gave her blond hair, she does not see her impairment as a curse. She believes that God is so good that He is uniquely fathering her through struggles, and as she told her husband recently, “I don’t want the Lord to heal my eyes until He has fulfilled all His purposes through my limited eyesight.”

Debbie clarified that she absolutely wants to be healed and continues to ask God to do it.

“Of course, everyone wants to be normal. But who defines normal? I still wouldn’t be normal if I had perfect eyesight. We’ve all got thorns in our side.”

To others who live with a vexing thorn in their side, Debbie gives this advice: “Having Jesus walk with you through the grief and pain of the thorn is the victorious way. I often look at my life and I’m blessed with so many friends, and so much of that grew out of my need for other people. I would not be the person I am without them.

“The American dream of being self-sufficient just isn’t the case for me. I’ve had to receive nonstop and have been on the receiving end most of my life. As much as I didn’t want this thorn, it’s one of the primary ways God has met me, and I’m willing to keep living with it as long as He wants to keep working through it.”