Imagine not being able to hear.  You can’t hear the voices of your loved ones.  You can’t hear the birds sing.  You can’t hear music.

That’s why Poppy O’Guin Steele has made it her life’s mission to be an advocate for deaf children.

“Her actions prove even louder than her words, whether spoken by mouth or signed by hand” writes Ken Beck in a recent article in The Christian Chronicle.  “She founded the Sign Club Co. in 2012.  Since then the organization, based in Tennessee’s Sumner County, has taught sign language to more than 1,800 youngsters, with Steele teaching about 900 of them herself.”

“Our No. 1 goal is to create friends for our deaf children,” says Steele.  “I find that, especially for deaf children, their safety and literacy is often affected by their isolation.  They rarely will have family or friends around them who communicate in their language.  So many of our deaf children hardly have language at all.  We try to create a community around them who can communicate with them.”

One of Steele’s Club projects is “Silent Night Dinner,” based on a Tuesday night tradition her parents began.  “Anyone who came,” she explains, “had to sign or sit quietly, whether we went out to eat or stayed home.”  When the selected location is at a restaurant, Steele will give some sign language training to some of the employees.  Then she selects a date and invites the deaf in the community as well as some of her sign language students to come and share the meal and engage with one another.

“Once, at a Chick-fil-A where I had taught the staff, one of our deaf teens came in and went to order in sign language, and the cashier took the order and exchanged money.  She then sat down with the hearing students, and they all had a lovely evening laughing and talking in sign language, and in that moment I said, ‘This is what we do.’  This child who sat at lunch by herself was no longer alone.  She had friends and was being a teenager and laughing.”

The sound barrier that had isolated a child had been broken.

Because God loves us so much, He has “broken the barrier” that separated us from Him.  That barrier was created by our sins (Isaiah 59:1-2).

To break the sin barrier, God had to send His Son to die on the cross for our sins (John 3:16).  Only the sinless Son of God could pay the price for our redemption (1 Peter 1:18-19), and He did.  “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace” (Ephesians 1:7).

God will save and give eternal life to those who place their faith and trust in Jesus (Acts 16:30-31), turn from their sins in repentance (Acts 17:30-31), confess Jesus before men (Romans 10:9-10), and are baptized (immersed) into Christ for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38).  The blood of Jesus will continue to wash away the sins of those who continue to walk in the light of His Word (1 John 1:7).

God has broken through the barrier of sin that kept us from Him by giving His Son to die on the cross for our sins.  We don’t have to be separated and lost any more, if only we will accept the offer of His grace and mercy on His terms.  Won’t YOU?

-- David A. Sargent

* Information gleaned from “Breaking the Sound Barrier” by Ken Beck in The Christian Chronicle, June 1, 2018, www.christianchronicle.org.

David A. Sargent, Minister

Church of Christ at Creekwood 
1901 Schillinger Rd. S.
Mobile, Alabama  36695

Archived issues of Living Water can be viewed and accessed from our website at: www.creekwoodcc.org