intro-speck-tion

My eye is irritated at the moment. I usually wear contact lenses and it feels like there is a tiny bit of grit or something else under the lens. The contact lens-wearers out there will be empathising with me right now. Those of you who don’t wear them can’t really understand.

It was quite funny, therefore, that my daily bible reading this morning included Jesus using the example of someone with a plank in their own eye trying to help someone else get a speck of dust out of their eye. It’s another of his funny images using hyperbole (exaggeration) to get a laugh. Can you imagine someone wandering around oblivious to the plank of wood in their own eye but worried about the speck in someone elses? It’s ridiculous.

But it happens.

It happens when I am ready to criticise someone else without examining myself first. It happens when I am annoyed by something someone else has said or done and I have not stopped to think why they have said or done that thing, merely reacted at how it affected me. It can happen at any place and any time. Before I know it I can be busy worrying about someone or something else without first considering myself. That is one of the things blogging does for me – it makes me stop and consider the health of my relationship with Jesus.

So what should you do if someone comes up to you with a plank in their eye while worrying about a speck in your eye? Grace. Grace. Grace. Grace. Otherwise the speck may grow in size quite rapidly and before you know it there’s a whole woodworking workshop in there!


Vaguely dust-related joke…
A collector of rare books ran into an acquaintance who told him he had just thrown away an old Bible that he found in a dusty [there it is!], old box. He happened to mention that Guten-somebody-or-other had printed it. 

“Not Gutenberg?” gasped the collector.

“Yes, that was it!”

“You idiot! You’ve thrown away one of the first books ever printed. A copy recently sold at auction for half a million pounds!”

“Oh, I don’t think this book would have been worth anything close to that much,” replied the man. “It was scribbled all over in the margins by some guy named Martin Luther.”