Log In My Eye


So, I am driving home yesterday the back way from work. The route reminds me of the old ditty "over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house we go." It is a scenic drive and minus the deer and occasional tailgating driver, it is quite tranquil. There was a big old log on the road. As I was motoring, there was one of those scenarios where two tractors were coming the other way and taking up much more than half the road. This log/branch pincered the other end, so that I had no choice but to send up the automotive white flag, surrender, and stop. The log would have definitely messed up my car.

After the tractors rumbled by, I pulled around the log, and started to drive. But then my conscience bothered me. "What if someone else hits that log out in the road?" and "If it is dark, someone is going going to collide with that thing." I kept driving. Although the picture above is exaggerated in terms of log size, the road and woods look much the same.

Then, I started to think about how the characters in the Good Samaritan story probably had stellar excuses too. I was trying to grind down the log in my eye with rationalizations, like with a saw. "I have to administer the SAT's tomorrow, I need to go home to rest." After about two minutes of hemming and hawing, I turned around and picked up the fifty pound barked behemoth and chucked it a couple of feet into the forest. We all drive the societal roads and since we share them, we must make them safe for travel. No one drives alone, autonomous.

In our era of truth being subjective, one of the horrible consequences is that truth doesn't just become irrelevant. Like someone would actually want to hit the log with their car driving 45 mph. So, if truth exists in such a simple example as here, would not truth exist in all kinds of scenarios? Our post-modern definition of truth is just another way of saying I really don't give much of a damn and it gets us off the hook of being truth-tellers and charitable.

Pick up the log in our own eye.  

Matthew 7:3

"And why worry about a speck in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own?           

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