Sticks, Sticks, and More Sticks

I attended Alabama Christian for six years. Since I did not hold the perfect attendance record any of my years there, I will say that a very conservative estimate of the number of days I attended was one thousand. 1,000: The number of Math classes I attended. 1,000: The number of English classes I attended. 1,000: The number of chapel presentations I attended. I am happy to report that I remember a great deal of the English language, though I will confess I did not read all of the books that were assigned reading. (Sorry, but Charles Dickens just isn’t my thing.) I am also happy to report that I can still compute very easy Algebra problems in my head and that I still know the Pythagorean Theorem, though word problems about trains make me want to cry from the confusion.

While I don’t remember any individual lessons from these classes, the same cannot be said for my attending chapel. I remember several quite clearly. (You didn’t expect me to remember all of them, did you? I’m lucky to remember what I had for lunch the day before.) One such a lesson involved sticks. Namely, a small stick and a large stick figured heavily into the illustration:

A student walks by with a small stick in between her eyeglasses and face. The teacher walks in the opposite direction, headed straight for the student. The teacher has a large stick in between his eyeglasses and face. The teacher ridicules student, pointing out the small stick in her eye, never realizing the huge stick in his own eye. The student and teacher reset their positions. The teacher realizes he has a stick in his eye and removes it. He then helps the student realize she has a stick in her eyes, too, and he helps her to remove it.

We can recognize this as a dramatized version of Matthew 7:3-5: “And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.”

The Bible also instructs us to examine ourselves daily. We should always be on the lookout for ways to grow, things we can do to change, improvements we can make in our own lives. We should always remember our own situation before we set off to criticize others. In most circumstances, we have the big stick in our eyes. That is, we have no room to say anything. How about you and the stick in your eyes? What are we doing to remove them so we can grow and, in turn, help others?