INVITE THE SPIRIT TO EXAMINE YOUR SOUL – Part 2 of 3

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”

#5866

INVITE THE SPIRIT TO EXAMINE YOUR SOUL – Part 1 of 3

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”