What blind spot?
What blind spot?
when faced with the reality of you.
Man, these posts are getting vulnerable. It wasn’t the plan but here we are; as led by the Spirit. Real-time insights into the workings of the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer.
Correcting, crushing, shaping, moulding.
Not living in the most enjoyable time of my life at the moment but hey, (spiritual) surgery isn’t enjoyable but still it is good. I pray that this will be encouraging for you!
🧡
(I recommend hitting play on the voiceover.)
There are moments that happen every now and then when you get a mirror put up in front of you. It may be a person, or a situation, or a conversation that causes you to see yourself in a more accurate way than you did before that encounter.
It is a powerful experience when the reflection brings light to perhaps a gift that you didn’t know that you had or it brings a shift in the way that you see your value within a relationship. But it is a humbling and painful experience when the reflection brings to light an area of your character that is in desperate need for redemption. An area that your were convicted you were right about in the past… but turns out you were actually wrong.
Yes, that is what happened to me.
A mirror was lifted to my face and there I saw a reflection of myself being played out in another person; and I was floored by what I saw. It was me … all the traits, the reactions, the decisions, the ways of responding. It was exactly how I would have managed that situation… but it was all wrong.
I was all wrong.
I have always been quite a black-and-white thinker. I don’t really know why, perhaps it was part of the perfectionistic traits I had, or maybe it was because it helped me to make sense of the world and learn how to navigate through it ‘successfully’. But things, people, and situations would be very clearly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ according to me and my standards.
I have been a Christian for a long time and, embarrassingly, this didn’t make me better in this area. Being someone who had a knack for finding the ‘right’ way of doing things and then ‘ace-ing’ it (at least in my mind) just led me to be very sure about a lot of things that I had no authority or qualification to be so sure about.
Then I became a social worker which both ripped down my black and white world as well as built up a different type of monster within it. On the one hand, I quickly learned that the world was not black and white. The helping institutions were not always centred on helping and the abusive parents were not always horrible people. Grey and nuances seeped through the seams of everything, and my paradigm had to be rewritten.
But I was also the ‘social worker’ and that position of power often meant that my word and perspective on a situation was taken with great weight. I worked tirelessly to ensure that to the best of my ability, I did not succumb to conscious or unconscious biases, and I endlessly weighed up perspectives and opinions different from my view. But it was my job and responsibility to make assessments on high-risk situations and give, where I could, a confident recommendation. My paradigm shifted, it wasn’t so much black and white anymore, but my view versus theirs. My opinion, my assessment, my wisdom, and my judgement versus theirs.
Even as I write this my heart is so heavy. I don’t care how this paints me out to be. I am so grieved by how we can be deceived by our flesh, our emotions, our culture, and the god of this world into believing that we are right, that I don’t care how you think of me from reading this.
We have blind spots. You do. I do. We all do.
They are called blind spots for a reason.
I genuinely used to think that I would know if I had a blind spot. Which was probably my blind spot. Pride.
I used to think that I would know if I was right or wrong. That I would have a sense, intuition or just some ability to know if that was the cause; and that I would be able to deal with it before it hurt me or others.
Wrong.
They are called blind spots for a reason.
And when God, in His deep love and mercy, finally holds up a mirror to your face at an angle that reveals the blind spot, you have two options:
You can pretend you didn’t see it.
You can grieve that you did.
‘That was them, they hurt me, they said that unkind word, they, they, they, they.’
You turn away from the mirror with your finger pointing outwards, picking, pinpointing, highlighting and diverting the light away from your sin to the other persons. You are horrified by how they treated you, in disbelief that they could even dare do such a thing to you.
But Matthew 7:3-5 says
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
(Sometimes I wish Jesus wasn’t so clear about certain things! It really is a lot of conviction to deal with in one go.)
Jesus is not subtle about these situations. In this parable notice, Jesus is not saying that there is not a speck of dust in that brother’s eye, but He is saying that you must deal with the plank in your eye first! In other words, yes that brother may have done something wrong, but you must check yourself first. It is likely that you not only have something in your eye; but it is something much worse than what is in your brother’s.
Reading this parable again, I wonder why it would be a plank in my eye and a speck of dust in theirs. Honestly, in most situations, I believe that the plank is in my brother’s eye and I only have but a speck in mine. Ha! But Jesus does not put the emphasis of blindness on the other person but on us. I guess that is the point… when we are blind we are blind. We don’t see the plank in our eye.
So in those moments of grace and mercy, when Jesus points out the plank in our eye, we must take hold of that opportunity with both hands. It is an opportunity to become free, to get rid of hidden sin, to become more like Him. It is an opportunity to deal with our blind spot.
I think because it is a blind spot it can sometimes be a little jarring to face. It is hard to swallow the fact that how we see ourselves is not the fullness of what we actually are.
Psalm 139 has helped me to understand the concept of this over the years.
Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
This psalm highlights a fundamental truth that is so radically counter-cultural to the narrative of today. It is the truth that: You cannot fully know your own heart.
You cannot know what is hidden in the caverns of your heart. You cannot know the depths and unseen anxieties of your heart. You cannot know whether there are things set up against the Lord within your own heart. Not without the search light of God.
You are not the master and knower of your heart. God is.
(side note: therefore the advice of ‘just follow your heart’ is plain dumb. You should not ever just ‘follow your heart’. If you can’t even know the wholeness of your heart why on earth would you follow it?! You literally have no idea where the heck it will lead you!)
So if I am not the master and knower of my own heart, then really I should not be so confident in myself. I should not be so assured in my own right-ness (or more accurately righteousness), and I should be prepared for the moments where God, the searcher and knower of my heart, highlights something that I did not know was there.
If we take this position of humility, understanding that we cannot fully know ourselves, then the Holy Spirit can work within us with much greater ease. As we surrender and throw up our hands, the Potter can take hold of us, the Gardener can prune the branches, and His light illuminate the darkness.
It will be painful to face yourself with such honesty, it will be vulnerable and you will likely not like what you find. But this is what it looks like to throw off the sin and weights that hinder us from running the race. And though everything within you wants to resist the humbling searchlight of the Holy Spirit in your life, a great cloud of witnesses are cheering you on.
‘Give it all!’
‘Waste it all!’
‘Run the race!’
‘Eyes on the prize!’
They cheer…
But though they cheer, the reality is that you, like me, are probably grieving, grieving the reality of your sin. The reality of the pain caused to others by your ‘rightness’ and maybe a little humiliated as well as humbled by the realisation of it all.
But though we grieve, grief does not have the final word.
As we turn our eyes to the Great Physician, the One who is holding the scalpel, the One who lovingly and caringly makes the precise incisions and cuts to our hearts, we are met not with eyes of condemnation but with eyes of fiery love.
He is passionate about you. His love goes beyond our ego’s need for soothing. He cares for the destiny that He has set out for you, He cares about the person that you were meant to be before sin took hold of all things. He is passionate and committed to seeing you fruitful, free and redeemed.
And so let the grief lift as you meditate on the fact that His plans for you are good, that His precise work in you is for His glory and your fruitfulness, and the promise that though the righteous fall seven times, they will rise again.1
This blind spot is not the end, it is the end for that sin but it is not the end for you.
In fact, it is just the beginning.
It’s God just so kind?
Blind spots are painful to acknowledge but the alternative is to go through life not knowing it is there. I am thankful, though I am tired ha, spiritual surgery takes energy!
To all my new subscribers thank you for jumping into the deep end with me.
For all my day ones, thank you for staying around.
Until next time,
Love, Anna x
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Have a peek into my mind this week:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2024%3A16&version=NIV