Maybe you recall back when you first started learning to drive. Maybe it was your dad, your mother, or perhaps a formal instructor who told you that before starting the car, you need to properly adjust your mirrors to ensure a clear view of the road beside and behind you.
However, even after doing this, it’s likely you also were told to still be aware of the blind spots your mirrors don’t cover and that you’d be obliged to take a quick glance back over your shoulder before changing lanes on the road. It was good advice of course.
Having said this, with automotive technology being what it currently is, many of our cars now come with blind spot detectors. My own car, for instance, helpfully flashes a little orange light on my dash that warns me when something is lurking in my blind spot.
Too bad we don’t have blind spot detectors like this in other areas of our lives.
In the twelfth chapter of the book of II Samuel, following King David’s wretched behavior with Bathsheba made still worse by his intentional killing of her husband Uriah, the prophet Nathan approaches David with a fable tailored to reveal the glaring blind spot the king had in regard to his recent behavior.
Nathan’s tale concerned a rich man and a poor man. The rich one, blessed with a great flock, encounters a traveler, but rather than take from his own enormous holdings to feed his guest, the rich man snatches away the poor man’s only possession, a little lamb that the poor man dearly loves. The injustice at the core of the story enrages King David so much that he exclaims to Nathan that the rich man’s villainy is worthy of death.
Here we see our very flawed human nature at work. David doesn’t detect or experience the sharp point of Nathan’s story making contact with him personally until Nathan finally says to him, “David, you are the man! You had Uriah the Hittite killed in battle. You took his wife as your wife. You used the Ammonites to kill him.”
Our blind spots are like that.
In reading the writings of Arthur Brooks, a behavioral scientist and the author of the book Love Your Enemies, and in speaking to people like New York Times columnist, David French, as we did at our church a few weeks ago, a common refrain we hear about detecting our blind spots involves elevating the idea of intellectual humility in our lives.
In advocating that intellectual humility be practiced both with rigor and frequency, French suggests a superb entry point for such self-examination is to ask a question to ourselves: “What if I’m wrong?”
This simple interrogatory—“What if I’m wrong”—when sincerely posed and earnestly considered, works as a kind of glance back, a check, to prevent some avoidable wrecks in life or at least reduce their occurrence. It’s a rule of the road we should take up as a habit. Granted, it’s one that’s tough to adopt, but it becomes much easier if, as Brooks suggests, we begin to consider intellectual humility not as a psychological weakness to be avoided but as a cognitive strength to be embraced.
Assuming Brooks and French are liable to be right, I’ve begun to offer a prayer every so often that goes something like this: “God, reveal my blind spots to me. Show me what I might be missing in the way I think, in what I believe, and in the way that I am. Point out to me the things that I’m so sure of that, in truth, I’m actually wrong about. Show me, God, what I’m missing.”
Though I’m not always eager to offer a prayer to shine a light on hypocrisy and dissonance in my life, I’ve found it interesting, as well as a bit distressing, that it’s a prayer God seems ready to answer. While it can leave a mark, it also shows me where to change course or where I need an attitude adjustment.
Even though it seems unlikely—based on the fact that David didn’t see the upshot of Nathan’s story until the very end—who knows, maybe he prayed a prayer like this before Nathan came along. But regardless of whether David did or didn’t, this passage seems to be telling us that until we fallible humans have our own little orange lights installed in our field of vision warning us of what’s in our blind spots, we would do well to listen to wise folks like Arthur Brooks, David French, and Nathan, the prophet.
God, point out my blind spots, so I may adjust course and avoid collisions. Amen.
