Learning From a Dumb Mistake

Yesterday, I got water in my ear, making my hearing a little muffled, and I got the brilliant idea to clean the water out with a Q-tip. Turns out, that idea wasn't so brilliant since it seemed to only make the problem worse and my hearing hasn't gotten any better since. At the time, I was feeling pretty negative about everything, so I questioned how loving God could be when He lets people make stupid mistakes and bad decisions, and then suffer from them, sometimes permanently. Since then, my anger has cooled off a little and I've gained some small amount of perspective into the wisdom of letting people make and suffer from their own mistakes. Essentially, God lets people suffer as a result of doing stupid things, basically so they learn to not do those things. Usually, He warns us about things that we shouldn't do, just as I had previously been warned about sticking thing into my ear, but then He respects our agency, gives us the freedom to make mistakes, and turns those mistakes into opportunities to learn the lessons we had failed to learn the easy way.

I know that God isn't punishing me for being human, and He doesn't enjoy watching people suffer from their own dumb mistakes. But He has a very long-term perspective about all of this. He knows that even though I have muffled hearing in one of my ears, and even if I have that condition for the rest of my life, it's not the worst thing that could have happened to me, and at the longest, it's only going to last as long as my mortal life does. Even though it may seem kind of strict for God to let me suffer permanent hearing damage for one dumb move I made, He knows that the damage is not really permanent at all. While I hope I can get the problem cleared up soon, meaning some time this week, God knows that the problem will be cleared up soon enough, meaning some time this century. In either case, it's not really a permanent problem. No physical problem ever is.

In the meantime, I've learned a few things from my mistake. For starters, I've learned to not try and clean out my ear with anything solid. On a wider level, I've learned that I should be delicate with delicate things, like ears, people's emotions, and life itself. Some things are very fragile and should be treated with special care. I forgot that for a moment yesterday, but for now, my impaired hearing will serve as a reminder of that for however long my hearing impairment lasts. And if, even for one moment, that helps me to be more Christlike, to treat people more nicely, or to make better decisions, my lessened hearing will have done enough good for me to have made up for the inconvenience it's causing me now. Yeah, it's a bummer that I made one dumb move and I'll be paying for it for who knows how long, possibly the rest of my life, but if that helps me to avoid making some other dumb mistake, where the stakes are higher than guaranteed-temporary partial hearing damage, then it'll probably be worth it, and I certainly shouldn't get mad at God for letting me make that mistake.