(by: Geoff Brown)

I could see daylight.  The sun reflecting off the ripples of the pool’s water.  I was baking in the Missouri humidity and that water looked enticingly cool.  It beckoned.  And, like any ten-year-old would, I responded enthusiastically to its call.  At breakneck speed, I took off running down the hallway of that Howard Johnson’s Inn in Joplin where my family was staying for vacation.  I was going to fly out of that hotel hallway and hit the surface of that water with a cannonball that would be felt in three counties.

That’s when I hit the glass.

It had been there the entire time.  Plain as day.  Well, maybe not “plain as day”, and I guess therein lies the root of the problem.  

Speaking of lying therein, that’s what happened to me.  By God’s grace, the glass did not shatter.  It did, however, stop my forward momentum with a suddenness and sheer force that would have made Isaac Newton proud.  Suddenly, I was lying there, on the hallway floor of a Joplin HoJo, blood seemingly streaming from every facial orifice and the swelling bruises were already letting me know they would be big, black, and blue on a level no other ten-year-old had ever experienced.

Today, I look back on that misadventure with a chuckle and a keen sense of appreciation for the window-cleaning capacity of that hotel’s hospitality crew.  As a ten-year-old, I thought I wholly and completely understood what was happening around me.  In fact, I was so confident in my personal perception and my mere decade of developed wisdom, that I allowed my feeble understanding (Who would ever think to place a window at the end of a hallway?) to shape my decisions (hallway running, breakneck speed, carelessness, etc.) and see that adjectival “breakneck” very nearly come to fruition.

Here’s the thing.  No one laughed.  My siblings had similarly mistaken that solid pane of glass for blue sky and had been running too but they were not (mercifully) as fast as I.  My sister broke out in tears when she saw me bloodied and bruised.  My parents?  They saw it unfold but it happened so quickly that they didn’t have time to respond.  But, siblings and parents, no one laughed.  They were immediately there, wiping away blood and tears, my Mom holding my aching head in her lap, whispering reassurances, as my Dad ran with a speed I did not know he possessed to get ice.

They say that the difference between “knowledge” and “wisdom” is experience.  Over time, our accumulated experiences complement our building body of knowledge to form a maturing wisdom.  Like most ten-year-olds, on that hot day in Joplin, Missouri, I had knowledge – you know, “don’t run fast into hard stuff” – but I lacked the wisdom that hotel hallways are seldom left open to nature, that glass is most often transparent, and that a clear wall of tempered glass is an immutable force not to be challenged.

Today, all these many years later, I have the privilege of talking to a lot of ten-year-olds, ten-year-olds of all ages in fact, who similarly mix up their mistaken perceptions, feeble knowledge, and immature wisdom and make some pretty consequential poor choices.  But, for as often as I have these conversations and triage these painful moments in a student’s life, every time I go back to that HoJo hallway and picture my family – their compassion, their kindness, and their sense of urgency to see my well-being restored in spite of my foolishness.  And, that is what I would want you to know.  When your kid hits that pane of glass, and they will, in spite of your most immediate inclinations, don’t worry about anyone laughing.  Plain and simple, it represents an opportunity to demonstrate compassion to a child that is most apt to receive it and the chance to work together – school and home – to see knowledge, albeit painful sometimes, transform into wisdom.

Geoff Brown is the Superintendent of Northwest Christian School located in Phoenix, AZ. Northwest Christian School is one of the largest private Christian schools in the state of Arizona and the only ACSI Exemplary Accredited school in the state.

This post is sponsored by NCS Online. NCS Online is a fully online K-12th grade Christian school providing an online education that is rigorous, affordable, and rooted in Biblical worldview. To learn more about NCS Online, visit NCSonline.org.