For Wilshire Baptist Church
It wasn’t my best moment as a homeowner. Or a savvy troubleshooter. Or a tenacious investigator. Or a critical thinker. Or a take-charge alpha male.
It started when LeAnn came home from a morning appointment and said there was some kind of alarm sounding in the garage. I came downstairs from my office and could hear it as I walked through the kitchen. When I opened the door I was almost knocked over by the sound: three pulsing screams, repeating over and over. It sounded like a smoke detector so my eyes went to the ceiling, and no, we don’t have a smoke detector on the garage ceiling. But mounted high up on the wall was a small, square transformer. I walked toward it and, yep, it got louder. Found it.
But how to make it stop? I texted Steve Conner, who built our house, and another good friend who is knowledgeable about all things electrical and described the problem. Both were puzzled but said they’d look into it. Meanwhile, I went back upstairs to work but took breaks every so often to research the problem. That included flipping every circuit breaker, none of which quieted the noise. This thing must be hard-wired onto the grid, I thought.
When Steve arrived late in the afternoon I was waiting for him with the garage door up and a ladder standing below the squealing transformer. But he didn’t need a ladder. He looked up at the transformer, cocked his head like a hunting dog to get a better listen, and then he reached down onto a shelf near the floor and pulled out a white plastic smoke detector. He held it up to his ear and winced.
“Is that it?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
Steve nodded and smiled but brushed it off as I proclaimed my total and complete stupidity. At that moment I was prepared to hand over the keys to the house and declare myself unworthy to be king of the castle. Steve was cool about it and in fact stuck around to consult on something else that actually was real, but the next day he texted the following: “I’ve been thinking about the article you are going to write about how your focus on something can be so strong and convincing yet so wrong. I’ll leave it to you.”
Wow, such a powerful idea. It made me laugh, and then frown, and then wonder about all the times I have hung onto a premise like a dog with a bone only to find out I was wrong. Sometimes it’s from dogged stubbornness because I just have to be right. Sometimes it’s blindness to reality. Sometimes it’s trusting someone or something that isn’t trustworthy. Sometimes it’s seizing what seems obvious. Sometimes it’s lazy thinking and lack of thorough investigation.
I wish it only happened with smoke alarms and such and the results were mostly benign. Like the time I talked my brother into stealing Cokes from the red icebox outside the 7-Eleven. I was maybe five years old and I’d seen people grab bottles as they came out of the store, not knowing that they paid for them inside. I thought they were free. Or a decade later when the same two boneheads thought the transmission was out on the Ford Pinto because it would only move in reverse. So we drove in reverse – for a mile down alleys to be safe – only to get home and discover the obvious: the emergency brake was on.
These stories are good for laughs, but history is full of examples where misguided focus leads to tragedy. Like the fantastic but false notion that the Titanic was unsinkable and didn’t need lifeboats for everyone on board. Or that David Koresh and Jim Jones had been anointed with special powers to reveal the truths of the Bible to those who would believe.
And in between the hilarious and the horrific are the opinions and beliefs that we hold onto tightly with no room for debate and that divide us politically and theologically and frustrate us to no end.
I don’t have answers or solutions, but I don’t think that is what Steve’s comment was suggesting. Instead, I take it as a reminder that none of us are exempt from tunnel vision. We all need to back off and take a second look from time to time to make sure we haven’t missed the obvious. And then if we’re still so sure of ourselves, it might be good anyway to get a second opinion from someone who hasn’t been holding on so tightly for so long to our version of the truth.