Everybody else on the road is a terrible driver. They drift into your lane without a signal and treat stop signs like suggestions. They tailgate when you're doing the speed limit and crawl when you're late. When you finally pass them, you give them The Look—the one that says, "Did you find your license in a Happy Meal box?"
Here's the uncomfortable part. Sometime this week, a sweet old lady behind you gripped the wheel, said, "Oh, come on," and meant you. We're all somebody else's other driver. When they cut us off, they're a menace. When we cut somebody off, we had a reason.
In Bend, Oregon, a two-ton rock sits on the curb of a strip mall parking lot. The locals call him BOB, short for Big Obvious Boulder. He's big enough to see, but small enough to drive over... halfway. Then your wheels are in the air and you're stuck. Eight drivers found that out the hard way.
You can bet none of them got home and said, "Honey, I hit a boulder because I wasn't looking." It probably went more like, "It was the lighting. Yeah. That's it. Somebody ought to move that rock!"
Jesus told a joke about this. Picture a man with a plank sticking out of his eye, leaning in to get a speck of sawdust out of yours. Every time he turns his head, he takes out a lamp.
That's how planks work. And boulders. Everybody else can see them. But we don't notice them until they've done some damage.
Planks warp the way we size people up. When they lose their temper, they've got an anger problem. When we lose ours, we were provoked. When they dig in, they're stubborn. When we dig in, it's conviction. We judge everybody else by what they did and ourselves by our reasons. That lets us off the hook and keeps everybody else on it.
Jesus never said the speck wasn't real. People really do let us down. He just put things in order: "First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."
So before you give somebody The Look, it might be worth a quick check for eye lumber. And if you're ever in Bend, say hi to Bob. I was gonna say he's hard to miss, but apparently, he's not.