Someone tells you your tone was harsh, and before they finish the sentence you already have your rebuttal ready. That reflex is the best clue you will get. Staring harder at yourself will not reveal your blind spots, because the part of you doing the looking is the part that needs checking. What works is assuming they are there before anyone proves it, giving the people who know you well permission to name them, and treating the urge to defend yourself as a signal to slow down.
That is the case B.J. Thompson makes, and he makes it from an ordinary moment. He describes his wife telling him, after a conversation, that he came across harshly. His account is unusually honest: “there’s nothing more humbling than my wife saying to me, Hey, we had this conversation and I felt like you had a harsh tone.” Then he admits what happens next: “I immediately go into defense.”
Most people can recognize themselves in that sequence. The interesting part is what Thompson does after the defense kicks in, and why he thinks that second step is where spiritual growth happens.
Why the defense feels like honesty
When Thompson’s wife names his tone, his inner reply is that he was only trying to explain something. From the inside, that is simply true. He knows what he meant. She only heard how it landed.
That gap is where a blind spot lives. Your intentions are vivid to you and invisible to everyone else. Your tone, habits and assumptions are visible to everyone else and partly hidden from you. So when someone describes the second, you answer with the first, and it feels like the matter is settled.
Thompson’s turn comes from doctrine. What he has to recognize, he says, is that “sin has affected every area of my life.” And then, plainly: “And I could be wrong.” He does not mean his wife is automatically right. He means his own sense of innocence proves nothing. If sin has touched every part of him, it has touched his memory of the conversation and his read on his own voice.
He also names the move that keeps people from ever hearing a correction: “I need her to point out what I don’t see, but I can’t make a sweeping statement about her in order to neutralize what she said.” The sweeping statement might be you’re too sensitive or you always do this. Its job is to make the other person’s observation disappear without anyone weighing it. Thompson sees the same pattern at a larger scale, where Christians reach for a label to dismiss a challenger rather than consider the challenge. A label lets you win without listening.
Why assume blind spots you can’t see?
The alternative is assuming they aren’t there, and Scripture gives little support for that confidence.
Thompson points to Peter. “Peter is convinced that by no means would he ever deny Christ,” he notes, and Matthew records the vow: “Peter said unto him, Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee” (Matthew 26:35). Peter meant every word. His blind spot was a weakness he could not see, and his sincerity made it harder to see.
From that story Thompson draws a posture. Before declaring that you would never do something, take the stance of someone who knows they can be deceived by their own sin, and who will say, “I need to be open to missing something.” This changes the starting point. Ordinary self-examination asks, Do I see anything wrong? Thompson’s version grants up front that you will miss things, and then asks where your life gives someone else room to catch them.
The Psalms already pray this way. David asks, “Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults” (Psalm 19:12). The secret faults here are hidden from the one who commits them, and the psalm’s response is to ask God for cleansing. So believing you have blind spots does not require living in suspicion of yourself. It requires admitting what is true of every person and bringing it to God.
Thompson puts the warning bluntly: “we can all be Pharisees and not see it.” The Pharisees in the Gospels were serious about God and confident they were faithful. That combination is what makes the warning land. The people least able to see their blind spots are often the ones most certain they see clearly.
Why knowing more can make it worse
Thompson is seminary trained and says he loves systematic theology for the way it organizes Scripture and makes it plain. He also names a trap that tends to travel with training: the assumption that a degree or a command of theology “makes you immune to a blind spot.” People can slide from trusting that Scripture is without error to acting as if they are without error too.
His clearest counterexample is Apollos, a gifted and bold preacher who still needed help: “And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue: whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly” (Acts 18:26). Apollos was an able teacher with an incomplete understanding, and two people who listened closely helped him see more. They also did it privately. They took him aside.
Lisa Fields adds her own experience from seminary. When she went deep into study, her prayer life suffered, and she grew short with people who interrupted her. She concluded that “the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy in my life was prayer,” because “knowledge puffs up, but prayer brings us down.” She is echoing Paul: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1). Her experience explains why information alone rarely exposes a blind spot. Study adds to what you know. Prayer, as she describes it, forces the question of how what you know is shaping your heart, which is the question a blind spot most wants to avoid.
Who gets to name what you can’t see?
Thompson’s answer is specific. His kids point out things he misses. His wife does it “all the time,” and so do his friends. These are people who watch him across ordinary days and can see patterns that one conversation would never reveal.
Depth matters, and Fields presses the point. Saying you have relationships is different from having ones that can tell you the truth. Her questions make a good test for any friendship you are counting on: have you shared your stories, talked through hard things over a meal, and, most important here, “Are they allowed to challenge you?” A wide circle of pleasant acquaintances will rarely name a blind spot. A few people who have earned that right will.
Thompson also observes how blind spots usually surface: “When you come into conflict with something, that’s when you recognize it’s an issue.” People can grow up sure they hold no bitterness toward anyone because they were taught everyone is equal, and that belief can sit untested for years. Fields tells of a man raised in a home steeped in racial hatred who, after years of hearing Black Americans describe their treatment, finally understood when he watched a Black friend from church pulled over and treated harshly for no apparent reason. Hearing about it had not opened his eyes. Seeing it happen to someone he cared about did.
That is the principle underneath the whole conversation. The blind spot you are least likely to find alone is the one shaped by a life you never had to live, and the people most able to show it to you are the ones who have lived it.
What if the person naming it is wrong?
This is the fair objection. Assuming you have blind spots does not mean agreeing with every criticism. People misread each other, and some feedback says more about the speaker than about you.
Look at what Thompson actually says to himself in the moment: “And I have to have the humility to respond and go, you know what, maybe you’re right.” The word is maybe. He keeps his judgment. He just refuses to let his first defensive reaction stand in for it. Weighing a criticism honestly will sometimes end with the conclusion that it was mistaken. The point is to weigh it at all.
Fields draws on Paul’s confrontation with Peter. Paul writes, “But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Galatians 2:11). Peter had withdrawn from eating with Gentile believers. Fields notes that two things are true at once. Paul really did confront Peter, so naming another person’s blind spot is sometimes necessary. And Peter remained a brother whose other words still counted. She urges taking criticism issue by issue rather than painting anyone with a broad brush. That cuts both ways. You cannot dismiss a person because one critique missed, and they cannot define your whole character by one fault.
Thompson also hopes that people raising an issue are trying to share with you in a way that brings dignity, and he does not pretend they always are. Honest correction from someone who loves you is different from contempt. If the person naming your faults is belittling, controlling or frightening you, that calls for safety, and absorbing it quietly is no form of humility. Anyone facing that at home can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
Where the courage to be wrong comes from
Thompson thinks part of the problem is cultural. “We think apologies are weak,” he says, and many people have absorbed the idea that the goal of a hard conversation is to be right. He is careful to say people rarely state this outright. It shows in how they act: “we feel satisfied when we want an argument. We’re not satisfied when we want our brother.” The test is simple and uncomfortable. When the conversation ends, which would have satisfied you, the point or the person?
Fields passes along something she heard from a trained reconciler: defensiveness is usually rooted in fear. People fear being called a name or being rejected. Fields argues the fear has it backward. Most people, she says, will embrace you when you admit a fault and work through it with you. “But if you act like it doesn’t exist, then you isolate yourself.” The defense meant to protect the relationship ends up damaging it.
What makes it possible to drop the defense is where your worth rests. Thompson says it is fine that his family and friends see what he misses, “because my work and my value is in God and what he’s done for me, not in me being right.” If being right is holding you up, every correction threatens your footing. If your standing rests on what Christ has done, being wrong becomes survivable. Thompson’s phrase for it: “At the cross, there’s room for me to be wrong.”
He also describes the alternative: “instead of running to the cross, we run to comfort.” Every small moment offers that fork. You can take the comment to God and ask honestly whether it is true. Or you can retreat to whatever lets you skip the question, often by recasting the other person as the problem. Thompson warns that Christians sometimes call this persecution when it is really an invitation to see the gospel more clearly.
In practice, that looks like letting the defense rise without acting on it yet, saying maybe you’re right, tell me more and meaning it, then bringing the comment to God and deciding later whether it was true. If it was, say so. Thompson’s reminder that “God never made us to see everything” is no excuse for staying blind. It describes how God made people to see: through each other.
Your blind spots will not show up when you look hardest for them. They will show up in the small, irritating moment when someone you trust says something about you that you did not want to hear. That moment is coming either way. What you can decide is whether your life has room for it to be said.