Proposal for a Bumper Sticker: How Is Your Log Removal Going?

And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, “Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,” when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.

Matthew 7:3-5

Hearing this first-century wisdom preached in twentieth-century Arkansas marked a big step forward in my personal engagement with the church.  I was six years old, or thereabouts.  It was if a light turned on for me. It was as if I thought, ‘ This Jesus fellow makes sense. And he just gave me a delightful shock. Something to keep me awake and growing the rest of my life.  As for church, I think I’ll stick with it.’

I would enjoy many more trips to Prescott with my family, and much more training and nurture at First Methodist.   For me, it was holy ground.  Then my grandparents were gone, and not much reason to return. Years passed. My last trip to Prescott happened in 2013, when Uncle Paul died, and we needed to clear out his house.  Now the venerable matriarch of the group, I insisted we go to church.  I took some pictures.  Couple of years later, looking at the pictures, I remembered some unfinished business.  Listen:

At sixty-something and sound of mind

And long in the Methodist church

I remember how it started

Finding a place to perch

Perch at the church with my grandma

When I was six or seven

We prayed, and oh! we sang the songs!

I was sure that this was heaven

Creaking pews and ladies in hats

And me so young and small

Dark polished wood and walls of white

Fans whirring on the wall

Velvet on stately upright chairs

For preachers and bishops I guess

Should a bishop appear of a Sunday

We’d want to do no less

And there above the choir

Knocking at the door

Stained-glass Jesus with his staff

Stirred me to my core

Robed in red, gowned in blue

Poised to hear if I heard

Him on the doorstep of my heart

Waiting with a word

And then the preacher, Brother DeBlack,

He talked to us a while

And I remember the story he told

And how it made me smile

He offered a pearl of teaching

Before me bright it lay

It opened the heart of a little girl

And stayed there to this day

A log and a speck, how funny is that

How delightfully down to earth

I heard it in Prescott, Arkansas

Ground of my father’s birth

To me it made such perfect sense

That one can hardly see

To take a speck from someone’s eye

When in your own—a tree!

A log and a speck, a speck and a log

A sprightly thought for me

A verse I heard in the Methodist church

How lucky can one child be?

But hearing it is one thing

And practicing another

For often still I find a log

And hypocrisy? Oh brother!

Quick to note transgressions

And take your inventory

Not so eager to list my own

Examine my part in the story

I have so many blind spots

And miss important things

Stlll God loves me, this I know

God’s wisdom round me rings

 

Wisdom, and friendly reminders

God woke me, that’s a fact!

To take the time to send my thanks

To Brother Alfred DeBlack

Not him of course for he is gone

But I found an address for his son

My email flew to Arkansas

And I hoped he was the one

Why, yes he was, and he was glad

To have a word from me

He’d been that day to the grave of his dad

Under a lone oak tree

Looking back was Thomas DeBlack

When I reached out to him

Just two ‘kids’ looking back to their dads

Remembering Alfred, and Jim

Our fathers, and other dear ones

And precious days of old

When we were, as we are, beloved

Lambs in the Methodist fold

A lovely if sentimental thought!

For Tom may be a lamb

I’m sure he is—I have no doubt

But that’s hardly who I am

I’m a lamb not always lamblike

For I can hurl lightning and frogs

But I can be better if I can beware

Of lurking ocular logs

The teaching of Jesus hits us where we live. We cannot stand as humbugs before him for one second. He educates us down to the scruple…There is no getting away from the penetration of Jesus. If I see a mote in your eye, it means I have a beam in my own. Every wrong thing I see in you, God locates in me. Every time I judge, I condemn myself…I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God… You have to walk in the light of the vision that has been given to you and not compare yourself with others or judge them; that is between them and God.

Oswald Chambers

Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. And do not judge and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned.

Luke 6:36-37

And underneath are the everlasting Arms.