Stringing Along
Teen vision is amazing. It's remarkable to me that a teenager can look
directly at the biggest, ugliest mess and totally NOT see it.
"Son, did you clean your room?"
"Yeah, Mom, it's all done."
Then you peek in and see that it's "all done," but things are still swarming in
there.
I opened my microwave the other day and found a big fat mound of cheese cooked
onto the bottom of the microwave. Someone obviously tried to make one of those
nacho mountains. But how could you zap Mt. Nacho and not notice it's doing a
volcano thing a couple of minutes in? And then how could you just walk away and
leave all the cheese-lava smoldering there? Surely you'd at least notice
something was up when you pulled the plate out, got halfway across the kitchen,
then realized the plate was still connected to the microwave by a 6-foot
stretchy string of cheese. Selective vision.
It's just as easy to have selective vision in our spiritual lives sometimes,
too. Isn't it so much more pleasant to find a fault in someone else than it is
to notice a weakness of our own? I don't even want to think about how many
nacho-type messes I've noticed in others while stringing along a 6-foot
cheese-rope of my own.
But Jesus can give us a different kind of vision--vision that's not so quick to
dismiss our own messes. He asked 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' kind of vision clears those hypocrisies right up. And his kind of vision
is the kind that sees the best in others. His vision is filtered through love.
First Corinthians 13:5 tells us that real love "is not rude, it is not
self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
Loving according to the Lord's example will keep us on the right track and help
us to consistently see things more clearly. It's not only better vision, it's
the best vision. Even if you still completely miss the cheese ropes.
Rhonda Rhea rrhea@juno.com