People often ask what it was like when my kids were teens and pre-teens. Five kids in seven years means they’re all rather teen-ish at the same time. When people ask that question, I tell them it was basically about a ten-year search for some missing shoe, plus about seven-thousand school fundraisers. And also a whole lot of sweeping up breakfast cereal. Some of it from under their beds.
Semi-interesting factoid: “Total” is a relatively healthy breakfast cereal, I hear. But not when it’s been left under the bed with dirty sweat socks. For two weeks. It transforms into something else. If I could describe it, you wouldn’t want me to.
During the years of so many teens, I do wonder exactly how many times I had to say things like, “Son. You have to clean your room. We’re out of spoons.” I remember sweeping the kitchen floor wondering how it could be possible that I could sweep up more breakfast cereal than I’d purchased. Ever.
It also amazed me that the kids never noticed it. They could walk across the kitchen floor, crunching from one side to the other, with nary a blink. How? You’d think the vibrations alone would make them look down. Though it didn’t matter because even if they did cast a downward glance, they still never saw the cereal.
I would make fun of them a little more if I didn’t all too often struggle with my own blind spots. I notice now and then how I’d so much rather find a fault in someone else than to recognize any crunch of my own. I’ll admit it straight out. I can hear your crunch from a couple of miles away while not even seeing the houseful of Fruit-Loop-dust I’m standing in myself.
But Jesus helps us see differently. Not so quickly dismissing our own snaps, crackles and pops. In Matthew 7:3, He asked, “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the log in your own eye?” (HCSB). It would be comical if it weren’t so true. Here I stand pointing out someone else’s tiny corn pop while I’m neck-deep in my own?
Jesus went on, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a log in your eye? Hypocrite! First take the log out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye,” (Matthew 7:4-5, HCSB).
Every time we allow Jesus to help us see as He does, all those hypocrisies are swept out. His are eyes of love. We’re told in the “love is” list in 1 Corinthians 13 that “Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” (vv. 6-7, HCSB).
Eyes of love are truthful. They’re not hypocritical. There’s no self-seeking there. They help us not perceive ourselves as better than the next person. Paul made it clear as well in Romans 12:9 when he said that “love must be without hypocrisy,” and a few verses earlier, “I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he should think,” (Rom 12:3).
Jesus-vision brings a total transformation in how we think of ourselves, and how we think of and respond to others. Total transformation. Which this time is not even a remote cereal reference.