...mirror

Have you ever been guilty of looking at others your own age and thinking, "surely I can't look that old?" I love this story below that has been widely circulated:

I was sitting in the waiting room for my first appointment with a new dentist. I noticed his DDS diploma, which bore his full name. Suddenly, I remembered a tall, handsome, dark-haired boy with the same name had been in my high school class some 37 years ago. Could he be the same guy that I had a secret crush on, way back then?

Upon seeing him, however, I quickly discarded any such thought. 

This balding, gray-haired man with the deeply lined face was way too old to have been my classmate. Hmmm ... or could he?

After he examined my teeth, I asked him if he had attended Morgan Park High School.

"Yes. Yes, I did. I'm a Mustang," he gleamed with pride.

"When did you graduate?" I asked.

He answered, "In 1967. Why do you ask?"

"You were in my class!" I exclaimed.

He looked at me closely. Then, that ugly, wrinkled old man asked, "What did you teach?"

It's so easy, isn't it, to see the faults in someone else? We see their wrinkles. We see their gray hair. Even more than that, we see all the "specks" in their eyes Matthew 7:3. 

But we are not so quick to notice those flaws in ourselves.

-alan smith