Playing the blame game

I had a rather strange experience recently.  It was in the middle of the night, still dark outside.  I found myself in that weird in-between zone: I wasn’t fast asleep, but neither was I fully awake.  I was experiencing that feeling when you’re brain seems very hazy, and you’re not really sure what’s going on around you.

As consciousness began to dawn, I heard a high-pitched whining. My first thought was that it must be a burglar alarm going off in one of our neighbour’s houses.  For a while I tried to ignore it.  Unable to get back to sleep, however, I began to get annoyed that our neighbours were taking so long to turn the thing off (I had assumed, of course, that as on so many previous occasions the alarm noise didn’t actually indicate that a burglary was taking place!)

Eventually I slid out of bed and walked to the window to see if I could identify the offending house.  Strangely, the noise didn’t get louder as I walked to the window; in fact the reverse happened.  After some further investigation I discovered, to my horror, that the noise emanated from our own house!  I dashed downstairs, hoping to deal with the situation before our neighbours were aroused.

Why on earth was our burglar alarm making this noise?  We hadn’t set it that night, so there was no reason for it to go off.  I entered the key code: no response.  Not having the instruction booklet to go with the alarm, I wondered what I should do.  Unsure, I pressed as many buttons on the alarm control as I could see (a man thing?)  What happened next caused me much greater panic – our burglar alarm began to sound!  The original screeching wasn’t our burglar alarm after all, but now I’d set the alarm off, making the noise far louder.  I quickly re-entered the alarm code, turning off the alarm noise.

Looking around, I then realised that the offending noise was actually coming from the smoke alarm!  There was no reason for the alarm to be going off; no smoke and no fire.  I reached up and extracted the battery.  Peace descended on the house once more (I found it rather incredible that Sue slept through the whole episode!  Hopefully our neighbours did, too).

Looking back on what happened, it seems rather funny, though it didn’t seem so at the time (and it took me ages to get back to sleep!)  What concerns me is that my initial reaction was to blame my (completely innocent) neighbours for the awful racket which woke me up.  It’s so easy to blame others when things go wrong, and ignore the fact that we might have to take some personal responsibility.

Jesus himself used humour to warn his disciples not to be quick to judge or condemn others: “Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but pay no attention to the log in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Please, brother, let me take that speck out of your eye,’ yet cannot even see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite! First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will be able to see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.”  Perhaps one could say that on this occasion I learned an alarming lesson!