The plank and the speck

Planks

Sawdust

Some years back, I was beside myself with anger. I was just furious with someone who obviously was trying to undermine my work. I was obsessed with the situation and kept thinking about it, even after hours of stewing on how unjustly I was being treated by this villainous person. I thought about calling them up and bawling them out.

I actually was beginning to be concerned that I wasn’t able to be productive or think about anything else long enough to get some relief from my miserable hatred. Then, I suddenly flashed on Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 7:3-5:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Jesus’s humorous, hyperbolic teaching had a serious point for me. I realized that the plank in my eye was made of the same basic stuff as the speck in the other person’s. I soon understood that I was so upset because the speck I was seeing in someone else was something I didn’t like about myself. I was perceiving—or thought I was perceiving—something I didn’t like about myself in the other person. That’s why I was so upset.

The signal for me, the red flag so to speak, was being mad at someone. Whenever I’m mad at someone, I first try to remember to look at myself and determine if I have the same condition in my life. I estimate that this circumstance is true about 85% of the time for me, maybe more.

Just understanding this principle relieved me of my self-justified rage, and helped restore the relationship with the other person. I stopped obsessing self-righteously about the other person’s speck, and started to realize I had a plank in my own eye. It was humbling and, if I might say, healthy for me. In this day of so much self-righteous, political anger, maybe this would be a step in the right direction. At least, this experience gave me a little sympathy with the other person, something sorely lacking in much of our angry, self-righteous political discourse these days.

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