Blind spots

All day today, I have been fixated on blind spots.

The morning began with teaching LS how to drive. It was her first time behind the wheel, and my first time teaching driving! At one point, I taught her what a blind spot was. To illustrate that, I got off the car, stood at her blind spot on the right and asked if she could see me in the side mirror.

I should know better. A few weeks ago, I almost crashed into a public mini bus loaded with passengers as I attempted a U-turn. My mistake? I merely looked at my side mirror and was too lazy to check my blind spot.

It wasn’t as though I had turned recklessly. I had just reversed out of a parking lot, and was waiting for an opportune time to U-turn so as to head in the opposite direction. Looking at the side mirror, I saw a truck approaching me. I waited. It slowed down and stopped some distance behind me. There were no other vehicles behind the truck – the image of the empty road as seen in the mirror is frozen in my memory – and so I began to turn quickly, only to suddenly see the mini van flash past me on the right. My reflexes kicked in. I braked hard, while the mini van swerved and the moment passed without incident.

Despite having head knowledge about blind spots, a part of me cannot quite believe that the mini van didn’t show up in my mirror. What I saw – the empty road - wasn’t the whole reality. And what I didn’t see – the mini van - was actually there all along. I felt really bad for days after that, knowing that I almost caused an accident, and could have injured many people. As I mulled over the episode, I began to see the same dynamics at work in my spiritual life as well.

I’ve come to see (no pun intended) that my frequent bouts of frustration over work and life here are mostly caused by my perception of things. The depressive bouts often start the same way. A small handful of students behave in ways that disappoint or upset me – the “me” that is a product of cultural and social conditioning completely different from what my students have gone through. Then I become fixated on those behaviours or attitudes that upset me, playing and replaying them in my mind, and getting more and more affected. I begin to believe that this gloomy picture I’m “seeing” is reality – much like I was truly convinced the road was clear that fateful afternoon. And so before I know it, I’m driving myself into a spiritual collision, all because I believed what I saw to be the complete picture, when it isn’t.

The way to avoid the near accident was to check my blind spot before turning. And I know the way to avoid these spiritual crashes is to do the same – to recognize that there is a spiritual reality that my sometimes tired and harassed being cannot see in the natural. And those blind spots are so, so many.

God is here, right here with you and me, every moment of every day.

Can you see it? 

Jesus is risen from the dead. He is alive. And He is coming back soon.

Can you see it?

The Kingdom is already here. Its seed is in you and me. And it is growing, because the Sower is still at work, scattering the seeds of the kingdom in the hearts of the Timorese. This seed may be very small, but it shall grow into a majestic tree one day in which the birds of the air will nest.

Can you see it?