My Sister

Available for over a year

Spiritual reflection to start the day with Ennette C Lainchbury Good morning. My sister is legally blind and her guide dog isn't trained to go on the escalators. Whenever I meet someone new, I often ask this kind of, go-to conversational question, ‘if you could be prime minister for a day, what three things would you do?’ Guaranteed one of my answers is always the same or a variation on the same theme. I'd initiate a full country renovation of the transport system so that stairs, not escalators, were easily accessible and visible. My little sister's blindness is a quiet truth I carry, like the way a mother carries her heart outside of her body, the very second her baby is born. Often, I feel suspended between two worlds. My one life in which I'm a British citizen living in Nottingham and so happily married, it's nauseating. And then this other world; in that life, I feel responsible for helping my single mother who's trying to make a better life for herself and her children. In that life, I'm a big sister and my heart beats outside of my body. And I wonder if people will be kind to her, treat her with care. I wonder constantly if they know how truly special and important she is to me, and how powerless I feel knowing she lives at the mercy of the kindness of strangers. As I was thinking about all this, though, it dawned on me that all of life is this tight rope between deep pain and indescribable joy. So much of a 365-day year is made up of exactly that, isn't it? What's that trite saying? Without rain, there'd be no rainbows? God who opened the eyes of the blind, open my eyes today to all the wonderful things I have in my life, amid difficult circumstances, grant me the small miracle today of perspective. Help me appreciate the rainbow, despite all the rain. Amen.