Blind Spots
and burying the lede.
Blind Spots and Burying the Lede1
One of the features of golf in Scotland that you either love or hate is blind shots. Having spent a month playing golf at Shiskine Golf & Tennis Club (the best 12 hole golf course in the world), I got lots of exposure to them. The second shot on the 1st hole and the first shot on the 2nd hole are good examples, but the tee shot on the 3rd maybe the greatest blind shot in all of golf. A par 3 green situated up such a steep hill on the side of a rock face that you can’t even see the flag. After watching footage of his friends playing #3, DJ Piehowski of No Laying Up said that it looks like playing golf in Mordor . I could walk you through more blind shots at Shiskine. Three of the holes have specific devices in place prevent hitting into someone, a flag on #3, a traditional bell on the penultimate #11, and on #7 a gate-lever contraption installed by a local member after his return from one of the World Wars where a similar device was used to communicate in the field. These are not all the blind shots, just the most confounding.
There is something frustrating about playing a shot into an area where you will not be able to see how well or how poorly you’ve done until you get perspective on it. We like to know where we stand.
This often leads to one of the most infuriating things in golf. We have all done it. Hit what you feel is a perfect (or pretty good) shot, only to then not be able to find the ball. Thinking that you have been doing what you are supposed to be doing and then realizing you have not. These may be the most complicated moments for the psyche of a golfer. The truth is that you did not in fact hit a good shot, because the ball is not somewhere you can find it. You convince yourself, “this is not a reflection of poor play on that shot nor of my level of ability in general”.
This is the true blind spot for most of us. The painful places where we are shown not just how “off” we are but are forced to see it in light of how “on” we thought we were. One of my most limiting fears is that of “being found out” (Imposter Syndrome). Of course, I feel that mine is a bit more nuanced than that, and maybe a little uglier. My fear is that people notice what I am doing poorly while I assume that I am doing well. BUT that I am the only one that doesn’t know this. Maybe it is not the fear of being found out, it’s the fear of finding out that you’ve long been found out and everyone knows it but you. Being the naked emperor without the adoring crowds. It is why I sometimes assume that anyone who reads any of these posts is one of my mom’s friends who opens the emails that they subscribed to on my mom’s recommendation (thank you, ladies, by the way).
Anyway, one of my favorite moments of experiencing this was just after a round of golf somewhere in Tennessee. I don’t remember the name of the course, but I do remember that I must have played somewhat well, because of the pep that was in my step as we prepared to leave. I had played well with guys that had never seen me play golf. As they were loading up in the car, I slipped back into the little bar area to get a Styrofoam cup of ice water. I was cheerfully courteous to the lady behind the bar, the type of cheer that flows from feeling pretty good about yourself and wanting even more people to think well of you. Knowing that I was not buying anything, I still wanted her to perceive me as the type of person who appreciated her without tipping her.
“Would it be possible for me to get a to-go2 cup of ice water?”
“Of course,” she said, as she scooped in the ice and used the little hose-gun behind the bar to fill it to the top. She reached for a lid and a straw.
“I don’t need a lid, I’ll take it just like that, thanks so much.”
I received the Styrofoam cup and held it for about 2 seconds before I dropped it on the floor, splashing water and ice across the tiles for yards in every direction. The lady cheerfully walked around the corner with some towels. I stood there half trying to help, half looking around to see who else had been a witness. There is not much worse than being no help to someone who is literally cleaning up a mess that you just made.
I knew that my friends would be waiting in the car by this time but I was so thirsty (it was hot). After we (she) got it cleaned up, I bashfully said, “I am so sorry about that…”
and before I could get it out, she said, “I’ll fix you another one”
“Thank you, gosh, I feel terrible.”
At this moment I was still seeing the world through my own eyes with myself in the middle of this story. Understanding the whole episode as a humble man in his late 20s making a mistake but continuing to be extremely courteous and humble and treating this nice lady behind the bar MUCH better than so many of the crass characters that she might encounter during a day behind the bar or on the beverage cart at a public golf course. Heck, this may even be the highlight of her day, helping me and getting to show how kind and patient she was and how good she was at her job.
And then it happened.
After she filled a cup for the second time she reached for the lid and straw. I looked her straight in her kind face and said,
“I don’t need a lid, I’ll take it just like that, thanks.”
I took about 10 steps towards the door before realizing that the one thing in this whole world that this lady knew about me was that, “HE DOES, IN FACT, NEED A LID.” She did not know my name, or what I shot on the course that day, or that I was anything else in the world besides a “lid-needer.”
I spun around and walked back into the bar area and for about 6-10 more seconds I tried to tell her that I realized what had just happened, and how I was thinking about that I had just spilled and that I was sorry, that I have a bad habit of eating the ice while I drink water, and so I usually immediately remove the lid, and that again I knew that probably came off as rude, and how I understood how silly I had sounded…blah blah blah. I even clumsily tried to reach across the bar for a lid and straw, couldn’t reach it, so she had to come help me grab that too.
She just smiled and said, “don’t worry about it.” The truth was that even my return to apologize from this place of noble self-awareness would not be the most important part of her day.
The truth of the matter is that even if I don’t think that I need a lid for my drink, others need me to have a lid for my drink. Others who have to clean up my messes.
Sometimes our blind spots are revealed to us in ways that leave us mumbling to a stranger in a snack bar we will never see again. These are easy to write about and laugh about. Sometimes our blind spots are revealed to us in our marriages or our friendships or our parenting or professional lives and it is so painful that we scramble, we blame shift, we run away, or we rage inside. (If my wife reads this, it will oblige the most appropriate and heaviest eye-roll of all time.)
Blind spots are hard, but they are the places where Grace impacts us most fully. Maybe they are the only places that Grace truly impacts us. The places that we don’t know that we need forgiveness. The places that we get upset about because we hit it where we thought we were supposed to hit it, and the ball gets lost.
I can remember hearing a phrase for the first time in college.
“Cheer up. It’s worse than you think” and the fuller version credited to Jack Miller: “Cheer up! You're a worse sinner than you ever dared imagine, and you're more loved than you ever dared hope.”
If that doesn’t disarm us, I don’t know what will. Being a minister who (in rotation with other church elders) leads a congregation each week in a time of private or corporate confession of sin3, I have found myself wrestling with this idea over and over again, even as I walk to the lectern.
Of all of the “good news” that the Gospel includes, some of the best is that every time that I have a blind spot revealed to me, every time that I realize that I am a worse sinner than I thought I was, every time I am tempted to cover-up, to explain-away, or run-from something… I am invited to recognize in that very thing, that Jesus is a better savior than I had imagined him to be. There are no last straws with Jesus’ love.
If yesterday I knew him to be a lover of a guy who sometimes spills his drink on the floor, today I can know him as a lover of a bumbling, self-obsessed lid-needer who tells this story on himself… (at least in part with hopes that people will think he is clever, self-effacing and insightful).
This new year… may we all be licensed by God’s free and abundant grace to hunt for and bring to the surface the scarier parts of our hearts. The parts that we struggle to believe could be paid for by His shed blood. May we not only believe that they are, but that these parts of us might even become trophy displays of his transforming grace.
Another one of my blindspots, of which I think I am probably guilty here as well.
I married into a family that calls them just “Go Cups.” I still call them To-Go Cups.
Followed by an “Assurance of Pardon” from Scripture