Plank Eye

Read Matthew 7:1-12.

Now Jesus is getting personal! It is so much easier to see the speck of sawdust in someone else's eye than it is to see the plank in our own eyes...and if we're honest, we'll have to admit it's a lot more fun, too. It's easier for us to see so-called faults in others than it is to see our own. Somehow, even if we have the same fault, it's not as big a deal as if someone else has it. We get used to it. 

I wear contact lenses, and not the "soft" kind. I still wear rigid, gas permeable lenses. So when a speck of dirt or an eyelash gets on top of my contact, I know it. It hurts like very few other things do. I try to get it cleared off, but sometimes whatever is there just won't move and I'm not in a position to get to a place where I can wash the contact. So what do you do in that situation? You learn to live with it, and before know it, you don't even notice the speck anymore. I think that's the way a lot of us learn to deal with the planks in our eyes, the sin in our lives. We just get used to them and convince ourselves there isn't really anything to worry about. 

Until we see that same speck in someone else's eye. I knew an individual several years ago whose speciality was judging others. This person believed they had holiness figured out, and after settling into a church, they would begin to point out the flaws in others. When it was pointed out to them that their judgment might be a plank, they would pack up, spew anger toward the other person and move on to another church. The last I knew, they had been to five or six churches, pretty much all with the same result.

Jesus calls us to work on the planks that hang out of our eyes long before we worry about the specks in someone else's eye. At the beginning of today's reading, he puts it this way: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged" (7:1). Judgment is, ultimately, God's job, not mine. I need to focus on the plank in my own eye.

Which, by the way, is really bothering my contacts. Excuse me, I've got to go fix that.