Reminder from Sanjaya

December 16, 2009 at 12:41 AM (Creation, Disability, My Body, Theology, Travel) (birth, Black Nativity, driving, His Eye is on the Sparrow, Intiman, Sanjaya)

Yes, that’s right — I was reminded of something very important by our favorite local American Idol contestant, Sanjaya. Seems like miracles are everywhere this time of year!

One way or another, last week I found myself attending Black Nativity at Intiman for the second time in a matter of days. It truly is a spectacular show and I appreciated the opportunity to see it again. This time, though, I took away a very different message than I did days earlier — something that I explored in this earlier post.

Somehow I missed his introduction during the Saturday evening performance, but on Wednesday night I picked it up clearly. The young man about to sing the old hymn His Eye is on the Sparrow was the former American Idol. Although I have never watched a season of American Idol, I knew enough to recognize Sanjaya’s name. I knew him as the skinny kid from the Puget Sound that inexplicably kept sticking around week after week following the audience voting. This was confirmed for me as my friend that I attended the performance with giggled through the beginning of the song!

Sanjaya, however, reminded me of one of the most important lessons of my life — that God is near and that he has been with me every step of the way. I spend a fair amount of time here wrestling with issues around my creation and my disability, but just as pertinent are the ways in which I see God’s active hand as I look back on my 32 years of life thus far. So pertinent are these lyrics from the song —

When songs give place to sighing, when hope within me dies,
I draw the closer to Him, from care He sets me free;
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.

In hearing Sanjaya sing these words, key points of my life (and the questions that came with them) flashed through my mind:

– Upon my birth, my parents were told that I would never walk, never feed myself and would always be reliant on help from others to do daily tasks. But, as history has proven, that was not to be.

– Nearing age 16, I wanted to drive like every other red-blooded, American young man. After much research, we found a man in California that adapted cars with a steering wheel on the floorboard of the car. In addition, the local school district and the state government paid for the expensive adaptions to the car. Having a car has offered me independence like none other in the years since.

– Moving to college was full of unknowns: leaving home, needing help from a roommate I’d never met and moving to a big city. I’m still not sure how it all happened, but I graduated from SPU two years later and was on my way to a marketing career.

– Traveling for work posed a significant challenge. Although I had developed a basic system for how to function away from home, the device I used to dress myself was based on weak suction cups that required a flat wall surface to work properly. Again, the state Department of Vocational Rehabilitation stepped in and connected me with a man that would help develop the special device I use today.

These are just a few of the ways that I’ve seen God appear in situations that I was confounded by. And, he still often meets me in those moments today — usually at the moment that I give up trying to figure it all out!

It was nice to pause and to be reminded of this truth last week. It took Sanjaya to break through with that reminder and I’m so glad I heard it the second time around!