De-Planking My Own Eye

One of the great parts about my weird job is that occasionally I'll discover that the things that I'm given to work on or teach on are as much for me as they are for my students.

So last week I spent many hours working on a talk about hope. I talked about the importance of finding our hope in a Person (Jesus) rather than the fragility of a specific sequence of circumstances. I posted a bit from that talk last week after I gave it.

So I gave the talk on Thursday night. And then Friday morning, as I was journaling and praying, the scales were pulled back and I realized that in one specific area of my life, this was exactly what I needed to deal with.

I had a whole wad of hopes bundled up in a far-off hoped-for series of circumstances that was stirring up in me a spirit of animosity, greed, pride, competition, comparison, jealousy, anxiety, and grasping.

I had spent all week working on a talk for other people and hadn't realized that there was a plank in my own eye that I needed to pull out! My hopes were in all the wrong places. I needed to repent, to change my mind, to fix my eyes not on a hoped-for specific sequence of events and circumstances but on the person of Jesus Christ, who invites me to follow him personally into the hope that he has for me.

This was only furthered by a reading that I happened upon from one of my favorite authors, George MacDonald. I've mentioned him here before, but I'll fill you in again: if you like anything that C.S. Lewis writes, you need to read George MacDonald. When you do so, you realize how much Lewis "stole" from his mentor.

Seeing this made me feel not quite so bad about how much I steal from C.S. Lewis.

Here's a taste of George MacDonald at his best: "In anything that a man does apart from God he must fail miserably--or succeed even more miserably."

Oh that God himself might be my good. That my hope might actually be in him and his goodness rather than flimsy and fragile circumstances. And that I might actually run away from anything, even "success," that would be divorced from his goodness and presence.