Cru® staff member Lorna Johnson (right), who is losing her eyesight, prepares for complete blindness with the help of Joycette Kane, a mobility coach from Lighthouse Central Florida. Joyce gives Lorna pointers on crossing a busy intersection.
Cru® staff member Lorna Johnson (right), who is losing her eyesight, prepares for complete blindness with the help of Joycette Kane, a mobility coach from Lighthouse Central Florida. Joyce gives Lorna pointers on crossing a busy intersection.
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Sitting in a makeshift cubicle at the United Against Poverty office in downtown Orlando, Florida, Lorna Johnson counsels a couple experiencing homelessness as part of her ministry with Cru City®. To look at her they would never guess that this longtime Cru staff member and former Olympic alternate is facing a life-altering challenge of her own: the impending, devastating loss of her eyesight.
Lorna doesn’t yet use a white cane or cover her eyes with darkened sunglasses, so her decreasing vision is not obvious. But she has wrestled with God along the way — wondering how she’ll cope and fearing she’ll be sidelined or left behind by God and others. However, just as he has her whole life, God continues to demonstrate his love and care for her, especially through an unexpected encounter with a fellow Cru staff member.
With Joycette’s help and guidance, Lorna learns to avoid obstacles like this fire hydrant.
After noticing changes in her eyesight, Lorna was diagnosed with glaucoma in 2005. Although the damage to her right-side peripheral vision was permanent, she still had adequate vision in that eye, and her left eye was fine. That’s not too bad, she thought. I can adjust to this.
Then, in January 2024, her eyesight grew increasingly blurry. A new glasses prescription helped, but she learned that she would eventually be completely blind. Is this the end? she wondered, feeling depressed and angry. What do I do with my life now?
Lorna interacts with other Lighthouse Central Florida students in a low-sight computer skills class. Lighthouse is a training and resource center for people with vision loss.
Lorna learns to use low-sight tools provided by Lighthouse.
She felt alone, like no one else really understood. “God, I need help!” she cried out in prayer.
God answered that prayer.
Lorna researched low-vision resources online and discovered Hadley Helps, a website filled with videos of people experiencing similar sight-loss issues. She realized she couldn’t continue her ministry of coaching homeless high-school athletes, so she moved to Cru City’s Neighbors ministry. At her first staff meeting, she told her new team about losing her eyesight. That day, longtime Cru staff member John Powers also joined the team and in that staff meeting he shared about his decades-long journey through eyesight-loss.
God, you sent John here for me! Lorna thought.
God used John’s story and his example to give Lorna hope, as if to say, “You’re not alone. I see you. I’ll help you and give you what you need.”
God answered Lorna’s prayer for help through John Powers when he shared his story of losing his eyesight at Cru City Orlando’s staff meeting. On similar journeys, they now encourage each other.
When John was 28 years old, his doctor noticed unusually dense blood vessels in his eyes. John had already lost half his vision but was initially misdiagnosed: doctors called his condition untreatable but nonprogressing. He chose to forge ahead with plans to relocate as a Cru missionary to Eastern Europe. There he met and married his wife, Anne, also an American and missionary with Cru, and later they had two children.
A few years later, while home on leave, he was accurately diagnosed with choroideremia, which results in total blindness. The next day, while walking to a men’s prayer breakfast, he fell weeping on the sidewalk, crying, “God, I don’t want this!” After John arrived at the breakfast, God comforted and encouraged him through the men’s prayers. Ultimately, 18 years later, his advancing vision loss brought John and his family back to the U.S.
John carefully navigates the familiar interior of their house.
Anne Powers, John’s wife, walks their pet dog, Millie, while John’s guide dog, Gibbs, guides John.
Like Lorna, John also struggled with grief, fear of a totally blind future, and shame at being perceived as different, dependent and weak. He strongly resisted his wife’s suggestion to give up driving until the Iowa DMV told him, “Sir, your eye exam numbers are one-third of the state’s minimum vision requirements. You must turn in your license.”
John also initially resisted using a white cane. But two incidents contributed to him fully accepting his blindness: knocking down an older man and walking straight into a woman who thought he was assaulting her.
John discovered that, like all states, his home state of Iowa had free resources, workshops and training for the visually impaired. After moving to Orlando, John turned to Lighthouse Central Florida, a training and resource center for those with vision loss. “There are incredible resources out there for the visually impaired,” John reflects. “But it took me a long time to swallow my pride and say I needed help.”
Off duty, Gibbs naps at John’s feet while John works on a script for a podcast he’s launching.
Lorna trained for the 1972 Olympics in her late teens and was chosen as an alternate in the 100-meter hurdles and pentathlon as a 19 year-old. She learned the value of persevering — forcing her body beyond what she thought she could do. Growing up Black during the ’60s, she had to push through not being accepted because of her skin color. “My fear with blindness was that, once again, I wouldn’t be accepted, [now] because of my disability; but I’m pushing through that,” she says. “I still have a purpose in life.”
Lighthouse volunteer Emily James teaches Lorna how to tell if a stove burner is hot.
To prepare her for cooking dishes with liquid in them, Lorna feels the weight of water sloshing in a pan so she can keep it level while putting it in the oven.
Like John, Lorna continues adjusting to her new reality. And God keeps bringing people and resources across her path, as he has with John. After flying to Washington, D.C., to meet arriving Cru staff members from Africa at the airport, she saw several people with white canes who had attended a conference for the blind. On the plane back to Orlando, Lorna’s young female seatmate had been the conference speaker and gave her a wealth of local low-vision information, phone numbers, contacts and resources.
Lorna’s grown daughter, Brianna, had already planned to visit for a few months, and so she was there at the perfect time to accompany Lorna to trainings and doctors’ appointments. Lorna learned about Access Lynx, a free shared-ride door-to-door shuttle service for the disabled, enabling her to travel without always depending on her husband, Dirke, or friends to drive her. “All this has given me hope that I can live life independently,” she says, “and do things like I used to do, only more slowly.”
Lorna chats with staff members at Orlando’s United Against Poverty office downtown.
Instead of the usual shuttle or small bus, Lorna rides in this Lynx Access driver’s sedan.
Going blind is hard enough. How much harder would it be without the love, support and practical help from family?
“My wife has sacrificed a lot for me to be able to stay in ministry,” John says.
When they met while serving with Cru® overseas, Anne married John despite his gradual loss of vision. But every new phase of sight-loss has brought new adjustments and new griefs.
“It’s been God’s refining fire in my life,” Anne says. “When you first get the diagnosis, you don’t really know the impact it’s going to make.” She struggles to balance what she can still allow John to do — which is usually a help to her — and what she’s not comfortable with him doing anymore. Because she must take on more and more responsibilities, there’s less time and energy for herself. For example, when John stopped driving, they had a newborn and a 2-year-old, and she became the only driver in the family.
“I get so tired of this continual loss-and-grief-and-adjustments cycle,” Anne says, “and we’re still in it.”
Because John has a guide dog and often uses a white cane, his disability is obvious. But most people don’t ask Anne how she’s doing. “If someone did ask, I’d start to cry. I’d think, Really? You want to know about me?”
Anne didn’t realize it, but God was using John’s condition to prepare her for the loss of their 15-year-old son, Stephen, who died in 2014 unexpectedly in their home. “I have [two] wooden yokes displayed [in our home] as a reminder of what Jesus says in Matthew 11:28-30, but I often fight his yoke. I tell Jesus, ‘I don’t want to go that way, it looks dark and scary.’ Then, I sensed him say to me, ‘Are you going to trust me, that I’m good, no matter what?’”
She would never have chosen for John to lose his eyesight, or for them to lose their son. But she says she’s thankful for how these losses have made her sensitive to other caretakers and those who’ve suffered traumatic loss. Since these losses, Anne has earned a counseling degree so she can help others with similar struggles.
God has given both John and Lorna a new perspective on their disability. God encouraged John through John 9:1-3, where Jesus interacts with a blind man. “God enters into the broken areas of our lives and brings beauty,” John says. “My blindness causes me to lean on God more.”
John used to say, “If I was writing the John Powers story, I’d leave the blindness out.” But he stopped saying that.
“I can’t write a better story with my life than God can. He’s good and wise and powerful, so I can trust him.”
John leads a small group Bible study at his church and pursues relationships with his neighbors to show them Christ. He speaks regularly about his disability and launched a podcast about how his faith in Jesus has helped anchor him amid his blindness.
John and Anne lead a small group Bible study with friends from their church.
John meets with Glenn Gabriel at a cafe. As part of his Cru City’ Neighbors ministry, John regularly gets to know and encourage men from his neighborhood or church.
John expected God to work through his personal strengths. But he has ministered to others from what God’s built into his life through hardship and brokenness. God reminded him that Jesus “became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, NASB 1995) and was “despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (Isaiah 53:3, NIV).
After their son, Stephen, died, John remembered that God the Father “so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16, NIV) to give eternal life to those who are perishing.. “The magnitude of God’s love for us helps me trust him,” John says, “and gives me hope and confidence that carries me through the highs and lows.”
For anyone facing similar life-altering challenges, Lorna says, “God wants you to know that you’re not alone. What you’re feeling is a normal process. It’s an emotional roller coaster in the beginning. It often takes two to three years before someone fully accepts what’s happening.”
Lorna teaches from the Bible at Quest Church in Gotha, Florida.
Lorna leads a Bible study with other volunteers and staff members from the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida.
Lorna continues to volunteer with the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, where she tells people about Jesus and prays with her clients and coworkers. Her church has asked her to teach from Scripture monthly. She leads a women’s Bible study and mentors other small-group leaders.
“At first, I didn’t think God still had a plan for my life besides sitting at home, praying 24 hours a day, which I was afraid was all I’d be able to do,” she says. “He has always been faithful. He hasn’t taken away all my gifts, abilities, training and experience. I’m just learning to use them in new ways.”
Gibbs stands by while John and Anne enjoy the late afternoon in their neighborhood.
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