Planks and Cages
When I was still just a mother of 3 and my boys were all very young, we packed up and headed to a local park to enjoy the beautiful fall day. My toddler took off to the tennis courts while the other 2 boys climbed the play structure. River entered the courts, closing the chain link gate behind him. Swinging, I looked up and saw his little face pressed against the fence, staring up at me.
“Mom!” he yelled. “Mom, yah in a tage!” It made me laugh because from his perspective, the fence was enclosing me. He had no clue that he was really the one that was confined. And it made me realize that we all do this. We stand in our cage, yelling through the chain link, informing all the passers by what’s wrong with them. We think it will be a light of revelation to others, some kind of conduit of change, when all it really does is expose our own cages.
The Bible cautions us to remove the plank from our own eyes before we should ever attempt to remove the speck from another’s. The key to life without hypocrisy is to be more concerned with our own faults and perceptions than that of others. If we can do this, we naturally tend to feel less obligated to expose others, and it is much easier to love, regardless.
With the recent election and all of the discord that has ensued, we have to remember that the only thing we can truly change and control is ourselves. How kind we could all be if we just worried about holding ourselves accountable. We all have blind spots, we’re never entirely right, not every Republican that showed up at the Capitol Building was violent, the majority of BLM protests were peaceful. We have a tendency to inflexibly listen to people we disagree with, nullifying their opinions and experiences in advance because we know their bottom line.
Instead of gripping onto rigid beliefs that require us to divide and conquer, what if we listened for truth in unlikely places? What if our fences were less like a fortress and more like a pleasant boundary line? With you taking care of your own yard, and me taking care of mine.