The next morning I had an early breakfast meeting, so while everyone else in the family was still sleeping, I went downstairs to leave the house. There were some odd malfunctions. The hall lights downstairs didn’t work. The garage door wouldn’t open automatically. That was strange, but I didn’t think much more about it. Forty minutes into breakfast the server asked me if I was John Ortberg.
“Your wife called,” she said. “She asked you to come home. She said the house is on fire.”
I went home. Fire trucks were parked all over the cul-de-sac. I watched the outside of our white house turning brown, great clouds of smoke escaping into the neighborhood.
It turns out that a few delinquent birds built their nest inside the chimney casing. It eventually started smoldering and set off that loud beeping sound. Because we didn’t do anything (and when I say, “we,” it is my way of saying that mistakes were made, but not by me), a fire started behind the wall and did unbelievable damage. All from a little bird’s nest. A stupid little bird’s nest. What kind of an idiot would take the batteries out of a smoke detector so he could sleep better during a fire?
That would be me.
The smoke detector wasn’t my enemy; the fire was my enemy. The smoke detector was simply trying to help me.
– John Ortberg in “The Me I Want to Be”
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