Trying to see the truth about myself is like trying to see the inside of my own eyeballs. “Who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults,” the psalmist asked [in Psalm 19:12]. Fortunately, we are not left on our own. The Spirit is already at work in us. Our job is simply to listen and respond.
Once, in the middle of the night, Nancy and I were lying in bed and there was a tremendously loud beeping sound. Nancy gave me an elbow to the ribs and said, “What is that sound?”
I knew that if I acknowledged hearing the sound, it would be my job to go check it out. So I said, “What sound?” But I had to say it very loudly so that she could hear me over the tremendously loud beeping sound.
And she said, “That tremendously loud beeping sound.”
“Oh, that sound! Let me go find out.”
I went into the hallway, found the problem, and took care of it. When I got back to bed, Nancy asked, “What was it?” I told her it was the smoke detector.
“What made it stop?” I told her I took the battery out.
“You can’t do that,” she said. “There could be a fire in the house somewhere.”
“Nancy,” I explained patiently, “we’re upstairs. There’s no smoke, we can’t smell anything, there’s no heat coming from anyplace. I checked. Do you smell any smoke? I don’t smell any smoke. It was clearly a battery problem. Trust me. I took care of it.”
We went back to sleep.
– John Ortberg in “The Me I Want to Be”
