Anne Sullivan's Knowing Hands

When Anne Sullivan arrived at the Keller home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in March 1887, she met a seven-year-old girl trapped behind walls of silence and darkness. But over the next forty-nine years together, Sullivan came to know Helen Keller with an intimacy that astonished everyone who witnessed it. She could read Helen's mood from the tension in her fingers. She knew what Helen was about to say before the signs were half-formed. She anticipated questions before they stirred, sensed frustration before a single gesture revealed it. When Helen struggled to articulate a new idea, Sullivan's hands were already shaping the words to meet her halfway.

Mark Twain, who knew them both, marveled that Sullivan seemed to inhabit Helen's very thoughts. It was not surveillance but love — the kind of knowledge that comes only from years of patient, devoted attention to a single human soul.

Yet even Sullivan's extraordinary knowing was partial. She learned Helen over decades of close observation. The God of Psalm 139 needs no such apprenticeship. Before a word reaches our tongue, He knows it completely. He knit the very fibers of our being in the hidden places. His thoughts toward each of us outnumber the grains of sand — not because He studied us, but because He made us. The Almighty does not learn who we are. He has always known.