The birth of an army of blind people

Life often feels like standing at the edge of a busy street, unsure of the next step. We want control, certainty, and safety, but sometimes all we have is trust. Trust in something beyond ourselves, something that guides us when our own senses fail. This post explores the powerful metaphor of a blind person relying on a guide dog and how it reflects our need to trust life when control slips away.

I am in the process of reflecting on a recent entry in my journal:

“I am fearful, Lord. Fear has come to settle in my chest this morning, and it chokes my joy and hope. I am asking for a gift of faith, so that I may hear the still small voice Elijah heard in the cave when he had come to the end of himself.” You were not in the earthquake, or the fire, or the wind. You came in a still small voice that changed Elijah’s life and possibly even the future of Israel.

And I am standing at the mouth of a cave that I once thought was protection and refuge. Before me is a landscape that stretches further than the eye can see. I can only cry, “Oh come, Lord. Lead me.”

And You say, “You can only be led to the degree that you surrender to the One leading you.”

I realise that a blind person must trust the guide dog implicitly. She cannot trust even her own hearing more than the eyes of her dog. Standing at the threshold of my own understanding, I know that I am leaving behind much that has offered protection and belonging until now. I realise that one step can make a massive difference. Like a blind person standing at the edge of a busy street, I do not dare take one wrong step. I do not dare trust my own senses, for I cannot see even my own eyelids.

My life may depend on the next step.

Once I understood that all control is an illusion, I realised that I need help. The humility that followed the revelation of my utter inability to control the next moment has forced me to stand on that curb, and keep standing, until help comes.

But then the leash in my hand tightens, and I feel the pull.

It is subtle. Easily ignored. Especially when I am concentrating on listening for a lull in the traffic.

It takes much training to follow one who can see. Without surrender, it will end in disaster. A person has to surrender to the dog.

What is happening to me?

In Romans 8 Paul says, “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.” As many as have learnt to trust the Spirit of God more than their own reasoning, senses, planning, desires, or hopes.

These are called the children of God.

To be led by the Spirit means that I am not in control. That is the uncomfortable part. It means learning to listen for another Voice beneath the noise of fear, self-protection, anxiety, and my constant need to manage outcomes. It means refusing, at least for a moment, to be swept up into the panic of trying to fix everything from the outside.

It looks like Jonah in the belly of the fish. Saul being transformed into Paul. Moses standing between the sea and the approaching chariots with only his staff and the Voice. Jesus in Gethsemane, and then on the cross.

It is a posture, not of resignation, but of surrender.

The leash in my hand becomes a lifeline. It is not merely obedience. It is acute responsiveness: the willingness to wait, the refusal to be moved by fear, urgency, false responsibility, or desperation. It is the posture that keeps me on the threshold. It held Jonah while he tumbled through the water. It held Jesus through Gethsemane.

Creation is breathlessly waiting for this.

And, if Paul is correct, the whole creation is groaning and labouring together in birth pangs, waiting for the revealing of the children of God.

Creation is not merely waiting for better systems, better governments, or better explanations, although we need all the wisdom we can find. Paul says creation is groaning for a revealing. A birth. An unveiling of sons and daughters of God.

And who are these sons and daughters?

“As many as are led by the Spirit of God.”

Creation is waiting for people who can be led by the Spirit in the ordinary, vulnerable, frightening places of real life. Not people with a new religious badge. Not people claiming superiority. Not another movement with special language.

Paul is not giving us a title to wear.

He is describing a way of being.

Humanity is poised on a threshold.

All the training has been towards this moment. It feels as though humanity is poised on a threshold while every familiar place of safety is being shaken on a scale we have not known before. The words from Hebrews keep returning to me:

“One last shaking, from top to bottom, stem to stern.” The phrase “one last shaking” means a thorough housecleaning, getting rid of all the historical and religious junk so that the unshakable essentials stand clear and uncluttered. Do you see what we’ve got? An unshakable kingdom.—Hebrews 12:26–28, The Message

Three groans and a glory.

Paul gives us three groans in Romans 8.

Creation groans.We groan.The Spirit groans.

Creation groans in birth pangs. We groan within ourselves, waiting for the fullness of what has already begun in us.

Then Paul says something that feels like one of the most honest sentences in the New Testament: “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought.” That unsettles many of our religious formulas. It unsettles our training, our intercession courses, our confident language. Paul simply says that sometimes we do not know how to pray.

And that is true.

There are times when I do not know what to ask for. I do not know what should be removed and what should be endured. I do not know what to hold onto and what to release. I do not always know whether my prayer is coming from love or from fear.

But Paul says that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

So even our prayer life is being led from within.

That is worth pausing over.

When I finally come to the place where I can say, “I do not even know how to pray,” I may discover that the Spirit is praying in me anyway. Beneath my confusion. Beneath my attempts to sound faithful. Beneath my anxious words. The Spirit is praying me into the will of God.

Surrender is the required posture.

And once we enter that posture, we begin to discover participation. I follow the seeing dog without trying to find my own way. Perhaps this is part of the freedom Paul sees: creation being released from its bondage to corruption into the liberty of a humanity that has learnt to participate with Divine guidance.

The trees clap their hands when humans begin to walk in the liberty that has always been their inheritance.

Every human being revealed in this way becomes a sign to creation, to the principalities and powers, and to the great cloud of witnesses: there is an unshakable kingdom. The present struggle is more than the pain caused by the cancer of self. The pain becomes birth pangs. The hope that new life is on the verge of breaking forth becomes the strength to stand on the curb and refuse to move until there is a tug on the leash.

We inherited a path toward the unveiling of something in us.

In my fear this morning, I remembered that Paul speaks of two inner atmospheres. We have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, “Abba, Father.”

If we are children, Paul says, then we are heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. But he does not leave this inheritance in the realm of abstraction. It has a path and a shape:

“if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.”

Those who are led by the Spirit are led along the same paradoxical road Jesus walked: the road where suffering is not bypassed, but shared; where the cross becomes the womb from which glory is revealed.

So Paul can look honestly at “the sufferings of this present time” and yet say that they are not worthy to be compared with “the glory which shall be revealed in us.”

Not merely over us. Not simply around us.

In us.

Here the echo of Jesus’ prayer in John 17 becomes clear: “The glory You have given Me I have given them, that they may be one … that the world may know that You have sent Me.”

The glory has already been given in Christ. Romans 8 is describing how that hidden glory is unveiled in those who are led by the Spirit, often through the furnace of shared suffering.

The waiting cosmos.

When Paul rewrites the story of creation around this mystery, it becomes breathtaking. Creation’s earnest expectation is waiting for this revealing. The universe is pictured as on tiptoe, craning its neck, longing to see Spirit-led people come into view.

"For creation was subjected to futility, not as a cruel joke, but in hope: that it too would be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God".

Feeling the tug on the leash.

The freedom that belongs to Spirit-led children is not a private possession.

It is the doorway through which creation begins to taste deliverance.

And so, this morning, I stand on the curb again.

Fear is still in my chest.

The traffic is still loud.

I still do not know the whole way.

But I am holding the leash.

“Lead me, Lord.”

And then, perhaps, I will feel the tug.