Many of you heard my testimony last Sunday morning in church as part of our Christmas story-telling time. It was a blessing for me to share, as I hope it was for you to hear it. In it, I mentioned the guys at this Bible study I went to one fall while I was slowly coming back to Jesus. I’ll now share with you “the rest of the story”, a la Paul Harvey, of one of those guys. I referred to him as the “Air Force guy”.

In my freshman year when I met Jay, he had committed to the Air Force ROTC program. He was gung-ho about Jesus, the armed forces, and his country. He was active at many events, and was unafraid about sharing his faith. By all measurements, he was dripping with leadership potential. Big guy, broad shoulders, and a striking face made him the envy of most guys on campus. He was on track to get into flight school, and his heart’s desire was to fly fighter jets.

After I came to Christ in my sophomore year, I saw him around now and then, but he was getting more focused on his training track with the Air Force. By my junior year, I barely saw him at all. He began dating a girl involved with one of the Christian groups (not the one I was in), and they seemed like a very nice pairing. They got serious all throughout that year and the beginning of our senior year.

That’s when she decided to break up with him.

For whatever reason, he couldn’t handle it. He became obsessed with getting back together with her. She refused. He started stalking her. She refused to even see him. One night, it all came to a head when he wanted to see her and talk to her at her dorm. When she rebuffed his request to come down, he decided to climb the outside brick façade of the building up to the third floor. He got to her window, and when she wouldn’t open it, he punched it with his fist.

Dorm windows are made very strongly – you have college students inside them, mind you – and inside each pane of glass is a tiny reinforced steel mesh that the glass wraps around. That way, if the window breaks, the shards will be minimal, and the window won’t create further damage.

So when he punched the window, his hand crashed through the glass to the metal. It was bloody. Muscles and tendons were ripped. He had to go to the hospital and get surgery. And in the process, he lost some functionality in his hand. Gone was his dream of flight school. Gone was his desire to fly fighter jets. Gone was much, much more than a bruised ego or wounded self-esteem. His world came to a shattering halt like the tiny slivers of glass lying inside that little dorm room.

I still don’t know to this day what it was that drove him to do that. Was it damaged pride at being rejected by a girl when you’re appealing enough by the world’s standards for most women to throw themselves at you? Was it that underneath the bravado and machismo, there lurked an insecure, fragile guy who folded when dealt a tough hand? I’ll never know.

What I took away from that sad episode is that although we all obsess about the outside appearances of a person, God looks at the heart.  Similar to what God did to reveal to the prophet Samuel the future King of Israel (2 Samuel 16), perhaps this was another reminder that what we see, and what He sees, can be very different indeed.  In Samuel’s case, all of the bigger, stronger, more handsome men of the family were paraded in front of him – and passed over – until David, the young runt by comparison, was selected.

The apostle Paul articulates an amazingly radical worldview when it comes to viewing the inside and outside of someone. He says, “So we have stopped evaluating others by what the world thinks about them. Once I mistakenly thought of Christ that way, as though he were merely a human being. How differently I think about him now!”(2 Corinthians 5:16)

May we be people who do not focus on outside appearances, but fix our attention on the heart and soul of people – the things that matter most to God.