Broken Glass

Monday, 19. October 2009 by Dan Ryan

I didn’t even realize it.

Honestly, I like to think of myself as a fairly self-aware person. To study human nature, to ask why we do the things we do—I find that stuff fascinating. And my biggest case study would have to be…me.

It only makes sense, right? I’m constantly around myself, so I have years of data. I’m not prepared to say I have myself figured out, but I do feel like I have a decent working idea of what makes me tick. I have a good pulse on my passions, my fears, weaknesses and strengths. 

But a couple weeks ago, something small happened to me that made me call all of this into question. During one of my geometry classes, we were chatting about parallel lines. Apparently, I was making some grand gesture with my right hand when it collided with my glass of water I’d placed on a nearby cart.

I swear that what happened next occurred in some dimension of extreme slow motion. The glass fell about 4 feet to the tile floor below, survived the initial landing, and then proceeded to hop about a foot in the air before splintering upon second impact. Go figure. 

I hurriedly scrambled to pick up all the shards of glass and drop them in the garbage can, eager to get back to parallel lines and away from my clumsiness. Several minutes later, I noticed that my piece of chalk was feeling sticky to the touch.

I looked down and realized that my thumb had been bleeding, presumably since I had picked up the pieces of glass. All this time, I hadn’t even realized I was bleeding. Neither had any of my students noticed.

A couple days later, I was listening to a message about the Pharisees. While I do think the Pharisees get a bum rap, the speaker did say something scary about the Pharisees:

“They were spiritually dead, and they didn’t even realize it.”

Do those last words chill you? When I heard them, they frightened me a little—not because of the Pharisees’ condition, but because of my own. I mean, if I can be physically bleeding and not realize it, then surely I can be spiritually dead in some areas of my life and not even realize that, either.

It’s like the story of David and Bethsheba. Basically, David lusts after his neighbor’s wife, sleeps with her, she becomes pregnant and David has her husband murdered in a last-ditch effort to cover up the whole mess. Here’s where we pick up the story.

God sends the neighborhood prophet, Nathan, to confront David. So Nathan spins this parable about a rich man who hosted a traveler. Instead of preparing a lamb from his own flock, the tycoon decides instead to take the one lamb belonging to his poor neighbor and prepare it for the meal. Well, David bites—hook, line and sinker.

“David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb 4 times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.

Then Nathan said to David, ‘You are the man!’ ”  —2nd Samuel 12:5-7

Oops.

Sometimes we can be so close to a situation that we’re not able to see it for what it truly is. No red light goes off because the way we are, it’s all we’ve known. If our story ended here, though, this would be rather depressing. We would walk into the rest of our week feeling powerless and nobody would blame us.

God’s answer is simple in theory, but a little uncomfortable in execution.

“Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.”—Proverbs 27:6

Each of us has friends, companions with our best interests at heart. But by itself, that is not enough. Remember my students didn’t notice me bleeding, either, until I mentioned something.

Translation: we probably need to be intentional about seeking out these people and purposefully inviting them to watch, to look for the shortcomings, behaviors or words we will miss. For example, I really felt the Spirit telling me to gather one student from each of my classes—someone who knows both me and who I want to be—and I’ve asked them to watch for the stuff I miss. They will tell me when I’ve pushed too hard, been too sarcastic or fallen short in this quest to be Jesus-like. So that’s what I did last week.

In Psalm 141, the writer asks God to put those people in his life. He compares their advice and rebukes to “oil on my head,” a sacred Jewish tradition reserved for the guest of honor at a feast. Wow…what a mindset. The psalm’s author?

David.