If You’ll Sort the Socks
Hours after stepping off his landing craft into knee-deep water, Smith Shumway looked down at Omaha Beach from the high ground. Below him lay an amazing scene. Ships and landing craft stretched as far as he could see. Many were still circling offshore and others were coming into the beach. Airplanes were roaring overhead, and shells were bursting everywhere. The beach was littered with men and machines. It was a sight he would never forget and, unfortunately, one of the last sights he would ever see.
Soon after, Shumway’s life was changed forever by an exploding anti-tank mine. Advancing through the hedgerows of Normandy, he was only a yard behind a tank when it blew up. The horrendous explosion riddled him with shrapnel and thrust him into darkness. Over the following days he had to accept the fact that he was permanently blind.
The young officer spent the next two years in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, recovering from his wounds and adapting to his blindness. His progress was amazing. In 1946 he was hired by the state of Maryland as a rehabilitation counselor for the blind. He soon began visiting factories to show managers and blind workers that they could do many tasks previously thought impossible for a blind person. He became one of the most successful counselors in the nation at placing the sightless in industrial jobs. He also gradually worked up the confidence and courage to propose to his college sweetheart, Sarah Bagley. He told her, “If you’ll sort the socks and read the mail, I can do the rest.”345 Sarah consented, and they were happily married. Shumway summed up the peaks and valleys of his life and explained the powerful source of his motivation: “I felt that my heavenly Father had blessed me and spared my life for a reason.”346
For I tell you the truth, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.
—Matthew 13:17