Looking Beyond the Ends of Our Noses

By Audrey Stallsmith

I was annoyed—and more than a bit embarrassed—recently when, of the two dozen guinea eggs I had packed into a homemade incubator, only two hatched. I had, after all, incubated guinea eggs several times before under the same conditions and always had at least half of them hatch. Twenty out of twenty-four for the first batch, but that may have been beginner’s luck! 

In fact, I had even written articles on the subject, so I was supposed to be an expert. Of course, there hadn’t been two power outages during those other incubations, as there had been during this one, necessitating that I frantically plonk the incubator atop our gas kitchen stove to keep it warm. Then there was the chilly night that our front door blew open at home while we were at church, abruptly dropping the temperature in both the living room and the incubator. 

Now that I came to think of it, I was lucky that any of the eggs hatched under those conditions. Somewhere along the line, though, it did occur to me that I was looking at the wrong thing—the lifeless eggs still reposing on the floor of the incubator rather than the pert and perky guinea keets scampering around in a box under their heating light bulb. Births of any sort always are a miracle and should be treated as such by ungrateful persons who shouldn’t be demanding two dozen miracles instead of two! 

I’d recently been rereading one of my all-time favorite books, The God of All Comfort, by Victorian author Hannah Whitall Smith. And, in it, she pointed out that “We grow like what we look at.” Not meaning that I will begin to look like an egg, but perhaps become ossified over what didn’t happen rather than opening up to what did! 

We had recent proof of that in a letter from an always depressing relative, who is forever reviewing old grievances and blaming everybody else for the failure she thinks her life has turned out to be. She is extremely racist too, racists always having a habit of attributing all their problems to people who are different than themselves. 

Her assertion that she preferred nonfiction over fiction because she didn’t like happy endings made us laugh, but also was sad. Just because she didn’t get what she perceived as a happy ending doesn’t prove that there aren’t any. But she seems to have become so turned in on herself that she believes that only what applies to her actually applies. 

All of this reminds me of a Bible verse which struck me recently, where God says of the Israelites that “Their hearts were always looking somewhere else instead of up to Me.” (Hebrews 3:10) For the Israelites, that was to other gods. In our modern self-fulfillment culture, our “looking somewhere else” tends to be at ourselves instead. 

One of our white adult guineas got killed recently by a predator. Afterwards, her also white partner took to loitering in front of my brother’s large truck, gazing at his own reflection in the shiny bumper. Apparently, he thinks he is seeing his dead mate there when what he actually is seeing is himself. 

We, too, often believe we are perceiving things clearly, but our reflection gets in the way during our reflections! And, as long as we are looking at ourselves—even if at our failures as my relative did—rather than up to God, we are bound to get bogged down as she did. Of course, the same thing can happen if we get inflated enough with past successes to carelessly take current ones for granted, which could be the real reason my guineas didn’t hatch! 

Either way, we are centering on ourselves. A hen who began setting at about the same time I started up my incubator didn’t succeed in hatching anything either. But, even though she had much more time invested than I did, she seemed to take twenty-some wasted days with a matter-of-factness which probably would be a better way for humans to react too. 

“Fenelon says,” Smith notes, “that we should never indulge in any self-reflective acts [italics mine], either of mortification at our failures or of congratulation at our successes. . .” In other words, harping on either our successes or failures means harping on ourselves and that isn’t what Christians are supposed to be doing. We are meant to be looking at Christ instead. 

As Smith concludes ““This is the whole of religion—to get out of self and self-love in order to get into God.” Self always seems to be our default setting, though. According to Smith, “We seek to slake our thirst with our own experiences or our own activities, and then wonder that we still thirst.” In other words, we look inward for something which should come from outside ourselves. 

Speaking of looking and incubators, I’ve been reading a book about an immigrant showman named Dr. Couney, who—for quite a number of years in the early 20th century—made a living displaying premature babies in incubators to the viewing public. Some of that public probably saw the tiny infants as wonders of modern science. 

But modern science was doing precious little about those babies at the time. Perhaps partly due to eugenics and the “survival of the fittest” theory, hospitals generally just let them die. So, for desperate parents, Couney really was the only show in town. During his career, which continued up until the early 1940s, he is believed to have saved the lives of approximately 7000 babies, who were returned to their families after they grew large enough to survive outside the incubators. He also had a huge influence on Dr. Julius Hess, who would become the “father of American neonatology.” 

Since Couney didn’t use as much oxygen in his incubators as some hospitals would later, his infants were never blinded by an excess of that gas. And, since they were handled frequently by nurses, they didn’t suffer the touch deprivation some of those later ones would experience either. Couney claimed an 85 percent success rate for those who survived their first 24 hours. 

So, for the parents struggling with a decision, much depended on how they saw him. Some refused to hand over their infants to a man who was making a profit on them, had a hazy past, and probably wasn’t a real doctor—even though he did hire genuine doctors to monitor the infants. (He also was Jewish, which could have been a factor at a time when antisemitism was rampant.) Other parents thought it would be humiliating to have their children on display next door to the other freak shows. 

But most of those who looked on Couney as a savior rather than a scoundrel got healthy babies back. Those who refused to take a chance on him had to watch theirs die. 

The world has grown increasingly skeptical about our Savior too, but I think much of that can be attributed to people losing track of how desperately they need saving. At every new mass shooting, we keep saying, “How can people do such things?” as if we find the imploding of souls which don’t contain God’s spirit somehow surprising. 

But part of clear-eyedness is taking everybody’s inadequacy—everybody’s need of saving— including our own, matter-of-factly. None of the wonders of modern science have discovered a cure for human depravity, literally “crookedness.” And we are going to have to keep watching souls die until we again begin looking to Christ as the only show in town which can save us.