She could see the lilacs. It was May, and they were in full bloom. She had seen the couch first, because it was beside the couch that she had knelt to say her prayer. Now, Leslie Beck gazed in astonishment through the picture window in her family’s living room. There was her front lawn. There were the lilac bushes. They looked as they had when she had last seen them, before she had lost her sight, two years earlier when she was 8 years old. Now, Leslie found herself staring out the window and speaking the words, “Oh, my gosh, I can see!” Leslie Beck, now 65, grew up in a farming community outside Spokane, Washington. The area is a housing development now, but when Leslie was a child, it was countryside where she lived on a farm with her mother, father, older brother, and older sister. In 1964, a tainted batch of MMR vaccines caused a variety of health problems in many children of the community. Leslie contracted encephalitis, which affected the lining of her brain and the retinas of her eyes. She was hospitalized for a year. Leslie remembers having her hands tied to keep her from clawing at her eyes. “The pain was so terrible,” she says. Never lost hope Doctors told Leslie’s parents that there was no hope of her regaining her sight. They recommended putting her in a special facility for blind children. Leslie’s parents did not take this suggestion, and so, unable to go back to her former school, Leslie was allowed to, as she says, “run wild on the farm.” Until the day she knelt beside that couch to pray. Leslie’s family was not religious. Her father was a non-practicing Catholic, her mother an atheist. Still, Leslie says, she always “had a strong faith in Jesus” and believed He was present in her life. On that spring day in 1966, Leslie approached her mother and asked if Jesus might restore her sight if she asked Him. Her mother quipped laughingly, “Well, you can try.” Leslie decided she would, indeed, try. She walked into the living room, felt for the couch, and knelt beside it. “If ‘Master, I want to see’ By Marian Friedrichs Photo by Farrinni on Unsplash Marian Helpers in Action As a 10-year-old, Leslie Beck beseeched Jesus to restore her sight – and the first thing she sawwere lilacs in bloom outside her window. 4 Marian Helper • Fall 2022 • Marian.org Despite the doctors’ grim report and her parents’ lack of faith, Leslie turned to Jesus with trust, and her eyes were opened.
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