P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

YELLING AT BLIND PEOPLE

There’s a classic story I know many of you have already heard — but forgive me for sharing a quick snapshot of it again here on our Friday program. The great motivational writer, Stephen Covey, tells about a man on a subway who watched in frustration as another man just let his kids run wild. They were climbing up and over the seats, bothering other passengers, making noise, bickering and horse-playing around until you could read annoyance on a lot of faces. And finally this guy cleared his throat and said to the laid-back father: “Look, fella, why don’t you crack your whip a bit and do your job? Your kids are a giant pain. Are you blind or what?” Words to that effect.

And if you remember Covey’s story, the dad looked up at his accuser with anguish in his eyes. “You’re right,” he said, hesitantly. “I guess I should do something. But we just came from my wife’s funeral. The kids just lost their mom. And I guess they’re just . . . not themselves. I’m sorry.”

Well, you can imagine the long, embarrassed pause . . . with the clickety-clack of the subway wheels reminding everyone listening in that subway car that we don’t always know the whole story. There are pages hidden from our view, and funerals we don’t know about.

Have you ever launched into a mini-grudge, or maybe even a maxi-one — only to find out that you didn’t know about something? You go in to work, and the same guy who’s late every single day . . . is missing again. And everybody shakes their head. Some people! How does he get away with it? But then, around ten in the morning, the word begins to quietly slip its way down the halls and corridors: “Tom’s wife was killed in a car crash last night.”

Until that moment you were so mad. But all at once, in the famous words of Miss Emily Litella, you say: “Oh. . . . never mind.” And the great speech you had constructed in your mind just kind of dies right there.

I guess we often – in our blindness – nurture grudges. We’re mad and resentful because we don’t know all the facts. But friend, today let’s go at it from the other side of that subway car. How often are we improperly mad at that other person because we don’t take into account their blindness?

Question: You’re standing on that same crowded New York subway, eagerly riding to one of the World Series games that both Mets and Yankee fans got to enjoy in October 2001. All of a sudden, someone really tromps on your foot. I mean, they mash it . . . but good. Yow! And you whirl around to scream at them: “What’s the matter with you? Are you blind?” Just then you notice their dark glasses, their white cane. And that attack line dies in your throat. “Are you blind?” Yes, they are blind. And of course, we don’t get angry at a blind person for stepping on our toes; they can’t help it. They didn’t do it with intentionality.

In our featured gift book we’ve been mailing out to all of you listeners, entitled How Can I Forgive?, author Vera Sinton tells a story with a pretty familiar tag line. Here it is:
“In 1987,” she writes, “millions of viewers watched television interviews with Gordon Wilson. He and his daughter were buried in rubble by a bomb blast at a public parade in Northern Ireland. He was holding her hand as she died.”

Now friend, you and I both know that Northern Ireland has been the scene of simmering frustration for long decades now. I’m not a great student of political history, but we’ve all seen the CNN reports of those bomb blasts, the endless terrorism going on between the IRA’s Sinn Fein organization and the Orangemen, Catholics against Protestants. And here this Gordon Wilson had just lost a daughter to the violence, to “The Troubles.” But notice his response, as Sinton tells the story:

“He was holding her hand as she died. But he refused to nurse ill will against the bombers. ‘I shall pray for them tonight and every night. God forgive them, for they don’t know what they do.’”

I know you’ve heard that line before, haven’t you, and so have I. “God forgive them, for they don’t know what they do.” “I choose not to be angry, because the person who just stepped on my foot was a blind person. I choose not to hold a grudge because the person who lied about me was confused and mixed-up and scared, feeling so inadequate. I choose not to retaliate for this bombing, because the people who lit the fuse were spiritually blind, morally impoverished, by the accumulated effect of a million small hurts I don’t know anything about.”

Now friend, I know there’s a limit to this. There’s blindness, and there’s also evil. It’s painfully true that people sometimes set off bombs, and they know exactly what they do. They drive nails into an innocent Savior’s hands, and they do it with their eyes wide open. I know that. But how sobering to see that Jesus Christ, who was receiving those hammer blows, gave the Roman soldiers the benefit of the doubt. “Father, forgive them,” He prayed. “They’re blind. They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t realize the ramifications of this moment.”

Think about that person you resent the most in life, the person you really think has abused you and abused their position and abused their power. And maybe they have. But do you know their entire background, the full history of their childhood, their teenage years? Do you know how they were raised? Do you know the private, hidden torments they’ve been through, the breakups they had in college, the divorces? You don’t, do you? I don’t either. And even Jesus, who did know what His enemies had been through, who did have a full picture of their blind spots and also their deliberate sins, chose to cut some slack for these misguided, stupid, human men with their hammers and their nails.

We mentioned in a program last week the wonderful World War II saga, The Caine Mutiny, where a psychotic ship captain named Queeg made life pure hell for the officers and crew. Pretty soon they all hated him; they had grudges that were as red-hot as the mortar shells flying overhead. But author Herman Wouk describes a scene where the central character, Willie Keith, would go out on the deck and just look at the surging ocean, the vast expanse of sky.

“He could, at least for a while,” the author writes, “reduce Queeg to a sickly well-meaning man struggling with a job beyond his powers.”

There’s another pivotal scene where Steve Maryk, the executive officer, and Keefer, the ship’s communications officer, go over to the Fifth Fleet to tell Admiral Halsey that their captain is a loony, and that he ought to be replaced under Navy Article 184. In fact, Maryk has a log he’s kept, chronicling all of the dumb, paranoid, schizoid things the captain has done. And when Keefer begins to rant again about Queeg, about what a tyrant he is, what an abusive, evil officer he is, Maryk shuts him up with his own argument.

“That’s beside the point, Tom. If the old man’s sick in the head there’s nothing to be sore about.”

And Keefer, after a long pause, reluctantly nods. “True enough.” It’s like a blind person stepping on your foot. It hurts, but you don’t get mad about it.

In his chapter, “Nice People or New Men,” out of the Christian classic, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis addresses a Captain Queeg-type problem that bothers a lot of people. And it’s this: why are so many Christians jerks? Why do Christians mash your foot on the subway? Why are they so judgmental? Why are they so unfriendly in church? Why do some of them who live in Northern Ireland light fuses to bombs and kill innocent children? Why do Christians here in the United States, men who have been baptized in the tank on a Sunday morning, go out at midnight in a pickup truck and torch a black church? Why aren’t these so-called New Men and New Women very nice people? And why shouldn’t I hold a grudge against a person who acts that way?

Well, Lewis acknowledges the reality that when we Christians behave badly, we make Christianity unbelievable to the watching world. But at the very end of the chapter, he gives us this quiet reminder, and really, it comes right from the foot of the Cross where Jesus whispers those words about blindness and forgiveness.

“What can you ever really know,” Lewis writes, “about other people’s souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.”

I guess we should all put ourselves on the deck of that ship, the Caine. Everywhere around us are hurting, confused, paranoid, battle-scarred people: stepping on our toes, hurting our feelings, issuing stupid orders. Some soldiers are hurting in the head; some are just plain bad. How can we know the difference? How can we decide who to nurse a grudge against? How can we decide whether to mutiny or stay with the ship? It’s hard, isn’t it? But all around you is the surging power of the ocean, the forgiveness of Calvary, the tenderness of the Savior who says, “Father, forgive them all; they don’t know what they’re doing.”