-“Strangers devour his strength, and he knows it not; gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knows it not.” – Hosea 7:9
James Montgomery Boice comments:
G. Campbell Morgan wrote of this blindness, ‘Signs of decadence, which are patent to others, are undiscovered by ourselves; and we go on, and on, and on, the victims of ebbing strength, spiritually and morally becoming degenerate, without knowing it! We are blind to the signs which are self-evident to onlookers…’ It was of Israel as it had been of Samson so many years before: ‘He did not know that the LORD had left him’ (Judg. 16:20) (The Minor Prophets, vol I, p. 61).
David Foster Wallace makes a similar point in Infinite Jest; something you learn when you go to a halfway house: “That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.”
Denis, from Crome Yellow, learns it when he sees sketches drawn of him by a woman he considered obtuse.
One of the great realizations we can come to is that others will often see our faults before we see them ourselves. Don’t be afraid to ask them: What do you see as my weaknesses? What do you see as my greatest faults? What do I need to be working on? Is there anything in my character that you think I need to be aware of?
Others will see your gray hair before you do.
The same goes for a culture. I’ve made this point before. You often have to get outside of a culture to see what’s inside of it. That means that we need an outside reference point, or we’ll start going gray and fail to realize it until our hair is white. The mirror can’t be ourselves; it has to be something outside ourselves.
