Good Friday morning! Happy Black Cat Day! I just made that up; I don't know that it is any particular day other than a Friday here. The very fact that it is already Saturday in the other Sydney gives a different perspective on whole 'what day is it thing'. It's no wonder that no man can name the day of Jesus' return, we can't even agree to be on the same day around the world! Hey, did you see that Russia has done away with daylight savings time! Praise God! Now if the dimmer bulbs in the other parts of the world will wake up, we can stop this nonsense. We can at least come to some agreement on the time if not the day. What am I doing wrong today?
Each day, I can get up, open a news webpage such as msnbc.com, and start criticizing other groups or persons. It's too easy. People are dumb and act dumb on any given day. Not all of us at once fortunately, but each of us is apparently capable of the grossest dumbness at any time. Often it seems to be leaders of this group or that nation. Sometimes the dumbness comes from a love of power, other times a love of money. Sometimes the dumbness is inexplicable as in that terrible accident in Denver yesterday. Not only is it easy to criticize, it is easy to leap to all sorts of wrong conclusions about folks in the news.
This morning, I took my old Cabela's mug and taped a message for myself above the company logo. The message is one word - forgive. I like to use this mug to remind myself of one of the important duties we have as slaves of Christ - to forgive all those who have wronged us in this life. We forgive so that we may receive forgiveness. This deal is even spelled out in the Lord's Prayer: forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. We can also remember to forgive because often the wrongs are not all on one side. In my almost 20 years at Cabela's, you can be assured that I did some wrongs to the company and the forgiveness needs to go both ways. Any long term relationship has a need for the apologies and forgiving to go in both directions; any married folks with 20 years under their belts can tell us the same thing. No relationship here on earth is perfect.
So knowing that no relationship is perfect, why do we still feel the need to be so critical? I suppose you could blame it on the fact that as imperfect creatures in our own state, we like to point out the faults in others. This is not a skill that needs to be taught. How many of us have had a small child tell us that we are weird, or look funny, or some other innocent comment that can cut right to the heart? Probably all of us at some point. It hurts when that happens. We want to be wonderful in the eyes of a child, but often the child sees right past the pretend stuff we put on and puts a finger on our heart. At times it is easy to fool a child, but other times we aren't fooling anyone.
Jesus told one of his more humorous parables regarding this tendency to criticize. The beam and the speck. Your Bible might use board or mote or splinter in the same parable. I was told that the Greek word Jesus used referred to the main beam used to build a house, in other words a very large and heavy board. Obviously this wouldn't fit in anyones eye. Jesus used a funny metaphor to show us just how bad this tendency is in each of us to ignore our own faults and bring up the faults of others. Removing the beam from our own eye allows us to start looking for the good in a person. Finding the gifts God has given each of us is so much more rewarding than pointing out the faults that any fool can see.
Have a wonderful weekend in Christ Jesus!
Bucky
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