“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?” Matthew 7:3.
If you are anything like me, you know this verse well.
It is tucked in near the end of the Sermon on the Mount. This lengthy teaching starting in Matthew 5 is a call to a paradigm shift on how to view God’s law. Jesus is calling people to apply the same level of judgment to themselves as they do to others.
Matthew 7:1-5 preaches itself and has been used in many sermons for good reason. It is always easier to see the fault in others than it is to see them in ourselves.
The scenario Jesus lays out is from the perspective of the person with the plank, or log in some translations, in their eye. But what if we look at this from the other angle?
I sat across the table from my husband in an Applebee’s restaurant, our brand new baby girl tucked safely in her infant carrier at the end of the booth. It had been a long, emotional day of doctors’ appointments, emergency lactation assistance, and postpartum hormones. I stared at my tiny daughter, and despite the struggles of the day, my heart swelled with love for her. In that same moment the thought crossed my mind that I could never walk away from her. However, that is just what had been done to me a long time ago. How do parents who truly love their children ever walk away from them? Something shifted in me, and I suddenly saw my childhood through a whole new paradigm. Anger and hurt welled up within me, and it would not leave for years to come.
Looking at this moment, I was not the one with the plank in my eye.
There was another person who had been clearly in the wrong. Something had been done to me that I had no control over. The part that took me a long time to discover was there were two people in Jesus’ story. One with a plank, and one with a speck. When someone else is clearly in the wrong, when their plank is very visible, we can forget to look for the speck in our own eye.
For years I focused on the fact that a parent chose to walk away from me as a child.
While I was not to blame for that parent leaving, there was still a speck in my eye that I had not taken the time to discover.
When I became intentional about increasing my self awareness, God allowed me to see I had been holding on to unforgiveness toward this parent.
My parent leaving was not my fault. The snowball of events that came as a result of that choice were not my fault. However, choosing not to forgive was one hundred percent on me.
We can never completely avoid being wronged in the context of a relationship.
Sometimes the wrong doing will be split pretty evenly between those involved. Other times, the fault will weigh heavily on one side. When the fault is not on us, there is always value in still checking in with ourselves. Have we been honest not only with ourselves, but also with the other person about how what they did/said affected us? Are we holding onto resentment or unforgiveness toward him or her? While it looks like the blame lies fully on the other person, have we honestly considered if maybe it could be more of a 90/10 or 80/20 split? Is there anything we could do differently with this person in the future, even if it means being more honest, more confrontational, or more open about how their choices impact us?
Jesus was absolutely right to challenge us to look at ourselves first in every situation.
We do not have the power to change others, but we can change ourselves. Sometimes we will have a plank to remove from our own eye, other times it will be a speck. In the context of a broken relationship, there is always a need to take an honest look at ourselves and assess what we can address within us to help bring healing to the relationship.