Chronicle #24: The Blind Spot

Apparently, checking the blind spot was about to get uncomfortable.

I had already recognized something less than flattering mixed into my desire to share my Asbury testimony. Someone else had gotten there first, and apparently that bothered me more than I wanted to admit. Envy was one thing. What I hadn't recognized yet was what was underneath it. So I opened my laptop and began writing.

By then, I'd developed a practice when I wrote about God. I would pray and ask Holy Spirit to lead me, then begin. If my thoughts started wandering or an intrusive thought interrupted my focus, I'd stop, back up, and reread what I'd written. Then I'd pray again and continue. Holy Spirit, lead me. I genuinely believed He was.

And what I was writing wasn't simply a recap of our trip to Kentucky. I was writing about why I'd wanted to go in the first place. I had gone to Asbury believing God was going to heal my hearing. I believed that healing would become a testimony my family couldn't explain away. They knew my hearing loss. They knew I'd worn hearing aids since I was little. If suddenly I could hear, surely they'd have to acknowledge that God was real. And then maybe they'd believe. Maybe they'd come to Jesus.

It sounded beautiful. Parts of it were beautiful. I loved my family. I desperately wanted them to know Jesus. I believed God could heal me, and I believed testimony had power because I'd already watched Him use mine. The problem wasn't that any of those things were bad. The problem was that somewhere inside all that goodness, I had quietly assigned myself a role that didn't belong to me.

Heal me, and I will show them.
Give me the testimony, and I will tell it.
Then they will believe.

And somewhere inside that beautiful desire was a tiny word I hadn't noticed.

I.

Do you see it? I didn't. That's the terrifying thing about pride. I had always imagined pride as somebody thinking they were better than everyone else. Arrogance. Boasting. Needing attention. Walking around convinced you were God's favorite person while everyone else should probably just be grateful you showed up.

That wasn't how I saw myself at all. If anything, I had spent much of my life struggling with the opposite. So pride? Surely not me. Except pride doesn't always sound like, Look how great I am. Sometimes it sounds like, Look what I can do for God.

And apparently there was a difference between believing God could use my testimony and quietly beginning to believe my testimony was what somebody needed in order to find Him. I hadn't recognized the difference. Yet. I was still writing, and I had absolutely no idea that before I finished, something was going to happen that would make me afraid to read those words again for a very long time.

I also had Alexa playing my “God Is Good” playlist in the background, which contained only worship music. At the time, Nick and I had this belief that as long as we kept worship playing in the background, darkness wouldn't exactly want to hang around.

Apparently, Alexa was part of our spiritual security system.

Then “Born for This” by Thousand Foot Krutch came on. I've never been much of a fan of what I call rah-rah music. With my hearing loss, when music gets loud and busy, I have a hard time separating the words from everything happening around them. And for whatever reason, that particular song was annoying the bejesus out of me.

I was trying to concentrate. I'd already had another intrusive thought interrupt me. The music was irritating me, and finally I'd had enough. “Alexa, OFF!” Silence filled the room, and that's when everything changed. At least, that's where I remember the change becoming noticeable.

I turned my attention back toward the laptop, but suddenly it was like I was trying to look through fog. I squinted at the screen, trying to make out the words I'd been writing. As I stared harder, the letters didn't even look like English anymore. They looked like another language. Then, for reasons I still can't explain, I somehow felt like I knew I was supposed to read them backward.

Meanwhile, my hands had begun tingling intensely. Before this, I'd been so on fire to write that my fingers could barely keep up with my thoughts. Now I could barely feel my fingertips enough to touch the keyboard. I needed somebody else to type for me, I thought.

My family was outside, so I went to the window and started banging on it. They were less than ten feet away. I yelled. I hit the window. Nothing. Nobody heard me. I moved to another window where I could see Nick farther away near the garage. I tried making a fist so I could bang hard enough to get his attention.

That's when he saw me. And apparently, what he saw was enough. Nick came running.

Until that moment, I hadn't realized what my hands looked like. I knew they were tingling and numb. I knew I was struggling to use them. What I hadn't realized was that the fists I thought I was making had become contorted, my hands bending backward in a way I wasn't consciously making them bend.

Nick took one look at me, grabbed my shoulders, and commanded whatever was happening to let me go in the name of Jesus. I relaxed, and almost immediately, I melted into him as if I was loosened. Whatever had just happened was over. Then Nick asked me a question that suddenly seemed incredibly important. “Why isn't Alexa playing?”

I had shut it off.

That detail reinforced what we already believed about what had happened. To us, the sequence seemed obvious: the worship stopped, something dark came in, Nick invoked the name of Jesus, and it left. At the time, I had no doubt about what I believed I'd experienced.

A demonic attack.

Even now, I believe there was a spiritual component to what happened that day. But I'm telling this from the rearview mirror, and there are pieces of that experience I still don't completely understand. I've learned to leave some room between what I experienced and everything I think the experience meant. The computer was one of those pieces.

Afterward, I showed Nick what I'd been seeing on the screen. I told him about the fog, the letters that had looked like another language, and the strange sense I'd had that I needed to read them backward. Nick took a picture of the computer screen and sent it to one of our spiritual mentors because, frankly, neither of us knew what to do with what had just happened.

Later, when I looked at the photograph, I realized something strange. There was nothing strange about the screen at all. No fog. No different language. No backward letters. Just my writing. The last paragraph flowed naturally with everything before it. It sounded like me. It made sense. There wasn't anything obviously dark or disturbing about what I'd written.

There was only one problem.

I didn't remember writing it.

And that left me with a question I couldn't answer. Which part had been the attack? Was something spiritual trying to distort what I was seeing so I couldn't continue putting truth on paper? Was the writing itself something I shouldn't trust? Had I misunderstood what was happening altogether?

I didn't know. Honestly, I still don't completely know. At the time, though, I understood the physical experience—the fog I perceived, the numbness, my hands contorting, my inability to get my family's attention, and the sudden release after Nick invoked the name of Jesus—as a demonic attack.

What I couldn't figure out was where the attack began and where it ended. And for a long time, I wasn't willing to go back and look closely enough to find out. That would have to wait. For now, there was something much closer God was showing me.

Pride.

Not Nick's. Not somebody else's.

Mine.

And it horrified me.

I had gone to Asbury expecting God to heal my hearing so I could carry this incredible testimony back to my family. I had imagined what my story could accomplish. Then I saw the part I had somehow missed.

I wasn't going to bring anybody to Jesus.

Jesus does that.

Could He use my testimony? Absolutely. Could He use my healing? Of course. Could He use my writing, my voice, my story, my scars, or anything else I surrendered to Him? Yes.

But somewhere along the way, I had begun confusing being used by God with doing something for God that He somehow needed me to accomplish. That realization broke something open in me. I suddenly was so disgusted with myself that the word gross cannot adequately describe it. I went to the shower with a need to scrub it off.

It's difficult to explain because what I saw and experienced in that shower wasn't something I could have photographed and shown somebody afterward. But as I scrubbed myself, I saw what looked to me like black, tar-like goo coming out and off as I forcefully washed. And in my mind, I knew what it represented.

So I kept scrubbing. I wanted it gone. All of it. The pride I knew about and the pride I didn't. The pride hiding inside good intentions. The pride wearing testimony clothes. The pride that could take something God genuinely gave me and quietly shift the attention from what He could do to what I might accomplish with it.

I had spent so much of my life believing I wasn't prideful that discovering it inside me felt almost more frightening than discovering any other weakness could have. Because how do you fight something you can't see?

Maybe that's why the blind spot matters. You don't check a blind spot because you know something is there. You check because you know there are places your mirrors can't show you.

When I finally stepped out of the shower, I felt clean. Not simply shower clean. I had been praising God and thanking Him for showing me something I hadn't been able to see for myself. Then, as I walked back toward the living room, that's when I saw it.

God was putting a garment on me.

It was white, but calling it white almost doesn't do it justice. It was brilliantly, beautifully white. I could see the garment in incredible detail. Even though the entire thing was white, when I looked closer, it was as though every individual thread carried its own version of white. Different threads, somehow woven together into one beautiful garment.

I didn't understand what that meant yet. Sometime later, God would begin showing me what I believe some of those threads represent. People. Places. Moments. Stories crossing into other stories in ways I couldn't possibly have understood while I was living them.

But that revelation hadn't happened yet. Standing there that day, I simply knew He was putting this garment on me. And the timing has never been lost on me.

First, I saw what needed to come off.

Then He showed me what He was putting on.

I had spent that shower desperate to remove something I hadn't even known I was carrying. Pride. But maybe God wasn't interested only in showing me what needed to be removed. Maybe He was beginning to show me something much harder for me to believe.

Who I was underneath it.

That lesson would take considerably longer. Because it's one thing to let God show you what you're not. It's another thing entirely to believe Him when He shows you who you are.

Companion Thought:

Humility isn't thinking less of what God put inside you. It's remembering Who put it there.

*The first testimony that began the growth of pride can be read here:

https://www.radiant.church/stories-blog/radiant-stories-001

Apparently, somewhere between good intentions and my own glory, I had wandered straight into the Bog of Eternal Stench.  Even Hoggle knew better.