Motes and Beams and Stinky Things

Last week our Church-wide "Come Follow Me" study included some of Christ's teachings on judgement from the sermon on the mount (Matthew 7). One of the poignant scriptures on judgment is Matthew 7:3, which says, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

When I was a kid there was a family at Church that didn't have the nicest clothes or the best hygiene. They had a daughter my age, and we were in the same church class year after year. I don't really know what the family's circumstances were, but I liked to steer clear of them (I came from the womb judging others). 

One Sunday, this girl smelled particularly fowl, and she was sitting next to me in class. The odor went beyond lack of bathing - she reeked of poo - so I kept subtly scooting my chair away from her. Then I noticed that the other girls could smell her, too. We started whispering to each other about the stink and shifting our chairs farther and farther away from the girl until she was on one side of the room, and the rest of us were on the other. It didn't matter, though, because the scent overwhelmed the entire room. There was no getting away from it.

After class, we continued whispering about how bad she stunk and how glad we were to finally get out of our classroom. 

As I rode home with my family in our iconic station wagon, I caught the smell again. I thought it must've been permanently embedded in my nostrils. But pretty soon, my siblings started saying, "Ew! What smells like poop?" The drive was full of accusations and blame, and when we arrived home, my dad ordered us all to check our shoes. To my dismay, I found that I had stepped in poop in my church shoes. The smell hadn't been coming from the girl in my class; it had been coming from me! 

The entire time... it was me.

I smelled like poop!

That was quite the life lesson for me (one I'm still learning from), and to this day, whenever there is talk of motes and beams (or whenever I literally smell poop), I remember how important it is to check my own shoes first.