Motes, Beams, & Packrats

Take a moment to summon in your mind the image of that one person most responsible for your troubles. Who comes to mind? Is it your boss? A brother? Sister? Parent? Child? One winter, during my senior year of high-school, I would have told you it was the boy who occupied the locker right next to mine. At a time when my sculpted hair and hygienic swagger were my primary concerns, I started to presume that my locker neighbor paid little attention to minor details of personal sanitation.

Something about him stunk, though I could not quite put my finger on it. When the smell persisted, I attempted to pinpoint the source hoping that I might reveal it to him without hurting any feelings. Day after day, I failed to find the source. And day after day, I grew increasingly annoyed. It became so awful, that I began to notice the smells in class, at practice, and even at home. I hated to think how the smells might affect my social standing. I was eager to confront him about the smell, but I was unwilling to do so without the evidence.

One day after school, I returned home stewing about the problem with such intensity that I nearly failed to notice the plumber my mother had called to repair our clothes dryer. He left the house looking pale, sickly, and a little disturbed. Once he had left, I asked my mother what was the matter with him. Obviously queasy herself, she explained that he had spent the last hour unclogging the dryer exhaust. Some packrat attempted to escape the harsh Canadian winter by climbing into the warm dryer exhaust, only to get hopelessly stuck deep within the pipes. Judging by the rancid decomposition of the rodent, it was determined that the packrat had been stuck in the pipes for quite some time – about three weeks’ worth by the plumber’s best estimate. For those of you who don’t do your own laundry, that amounts to approximately twenty-seven dryer cycles, each with the potent scent of mummified packrat.

With eyes and nostrils wide open, I knew I had discovered the source

Do you still have that one person in mind? You know… the one most responsible for your troubles? The swindler? The fake? The ill-mannered? Consider for a moment your interactions with that person and in light of my own experience, ask yourself this one question: Who really stinks?

Christ himself famously asked this question with a little more sophistication when he said:

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” (Luke 6:41)

Let’s face it. We all possess a powerful proclivity towards finding fault in others. Equally powerful is our ability to dismiss our own shortcomings. These two behaviors always build upon each other, escalating our ignorance and curtailing our kindness. Most of us will recognize the relationship between finding fault and avoiding self-examination. But do we adequately understand the lasting consequences of unjust blaming and short-sighted accusations?

Consider the example of Saul and David:

Once considered a righteous and venerated king, King Saul of Israel allowed pride and disobedience to impair his ability to reign and govern. King Saul refused to address his own shortcomings and repent of them. Instead, he obsessed over David and his growing popularity. Jealousy provoked Saul into finding David’s weaknesses in the hopes that he might exploit them. It is Saul’s preoccupation with David that caused him to lose his friend, his kingdom, his sons, and even his own life. Furthermore, Saul’s inability to address his own weaknesses resulted in widespread division, bloodshed, and chaos.

Saul’s example might seem a bit extreme, but through the lens of scriptural history, this pattern always repeats itself. When Laman and Lemuel blamed Nephi for their woes, their misguided view not only divided their immediate families, but they also laid the foundation for a centuries-long struggle between two nations. What started as a matter of individual pride developed into a grudge, a broken family, a contentious community, and eventually a shattered nation. The seeds of oppression, conquest, corruption, and enmity do not plague the community until they have first taken root in an individual’s own heart. Furthermore, these seeds do not take root in an individual’s heart unless they are inclined to find their neighbor’s motes whilst ignoring their own beams.

There exists an old tune that titled Let Each Man Learn to Know Himself. It goes as follows:

Let each man learn to know himself;

To gain that knowledge let him labor,

Improve those failings in himself,

Which he condemns so in his neighbor.

How lenient our own faults we view,

And consciences voice adeptly smother,

Yet, oh, how harshly we review,

The self-same failings in another.

Example sheds a genial ray,

Which oft-times men are apt to follow;

So first improve yourself today,

And then improve your friends tomorrow.

If you really want to make a difference in your marriage, your family, and your community, then we must make a serious effort to be our best selves while at the same time make an honest effort to see the best in others.

Of course there are those situations where the exercise of righteous judgment is still necessary. You can't just ignore or dismiss unrighteous behavior. Evil will always be evil, and good must be called good. However, even in many of these circumstances, the exercise of self-examination will accomplish more than simply accusing and condemning others. By taking the path of introspection and self-improvement, whether you are right or wrong, you will always arrive at a better place.

Hopefully now you possess a better understanding about how our obsession with fault and blame holds us back as individuals and communities. And hopefully you forgive me for the blatant irony in my attempt to write about this topic. It is hardly my intention to point out a mote in your eye. If  anything, my aim here is to highlight the observations I have made while attempting to explore my own struggles with introspection and self-improvement. If you will allow it, I would like to share some of my observations about how we might best overlook the mote in our neighbor's eye and how me might best address the beam in our own eye. Maybe one of these suggestions will ring true for you as they have for me.

Serve and Be Served

One useful tool we can utilize in our efforts to better see ourselves is the act of service. There are few things that facilitate the feelings of empathy and care more than the act of service. Walking a mile in someone else's shoes often allows us to see the world from someone else's perspective. Being a helpful presence in the life of someone in need not only removes the beam from our own eye, but it often helps us understand the mote in another’s. But equally important to serving others is allowing others to serve us.

Following my two years of missionary service overseas, I moved to Utah to begin my first semester of school at Utah Valley University. The move prompted a number of changes, but I was nonetheless eager to get on with the next chapter of life. As winter approached, I never gave thought to the changing conditions of the roads. After all, I had left Canada with an impeccable driving record in spite of the ice and snow that plagued Canadian roads. I figured that a mild winter in Utah County would be exactly that…mild.

One thing I failed to consider was the entirely inadequate winter performance of my recently purchased Kia Optima sedan. I had managed well for most of the winter with no incident, but one ill-advised u-turn placed me and my car in an icy curbside trap. In an effort to spare my pride, I spun my wheels to no avail. In my rearview mirror, I noticed a large jacked up truck pulling up behind me. When it stopped, two denim clad cowboy figures emerged from the cab and approached my bumper. I had judged that by the smile on their face, they likely shared a good laugh about the soggy slacked city slicker who had just hit the ditch in front of them. Pity obviously got the best of them and they decided to help push the poor chump out.

I will admit to being less than enthused about receiving their help. My manly image was clearly in question. I wanted to protest that I, like them, was a macho country man who could handle trucks, tractors, and winter conditions with the best of them. I never did say much to them besides a superficial “thank you”. I look back now and understand that I viewed my rescuers through a lens of pride and ego. Even more disturbing to me, is that I allowed my pride to conjure up a false accusation that these kind men were the ones being prideful. I still feel great regret over my attitudes that day.

By not accepting the service of others, you only stifle their opportunity to develop spiritually and you unwittingly create an increasingly jaded opinion of them. But if you allow others to serve you, you provide them an opportunity to grow and you provide yourself with an opportunity to view them in a different, more favorable, light. Accepting help graciously allows us to remove the beam in our eye and also diminish the mote in the eye of another.

Consider the Advice of Others

If you feel that you possess an incredible gift for identifying important improvements for others, you can surely count on someone else identifying what areas of life you might improve on! The moral and spiritual responsibility to grow and improve is ours and ours alone. That being said, if we are indeed serious about becoming our best self, you don't have to do so without help. All of us, to some degree, enjoy the company of good and honorable people. If we are truthfully interested in improving ourselves and the world around us, we must listen closely to those people who have a genuine interest in our well-being.

Accepting the advice of others can be a major stumbling block for many of us. Often times, our interpretation of another’s words, actions, or even inaction, can boil our emotions like heat boiling a pot of water; simmering hotter and hotter until it all boils over and someone ends up burnt. Unless we handle such situations with maturity and a healthy dose of trust, we will end up feeling betrayed and scorned. But if we understand the source of criticism and trust the sincerity behind it, then we can use the gentle criticisms of other's to improve ourselves and our relationships.

Don’t Do the Easy Thing

Perhaps the best way identify and remove the beam from our eye is to avoid doing the easy thing. Finding fault is easy. Blaming others is easy. Being the victim is easy. Human nature dictates that we seek to do the easy thing, especially in the business of motes and beams. Most of us find the process of self-examination to be an incredibly difficult task. Few things cause more discomfort than realizing that our misery and misfortune are actually the result of our own imperfections AND NOT the imperfections of others.

Theodore Roosevelt once quipped that “if you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t be able to sit for a month.” This statement is both comical and insightful. Recognizing our deficiencies hurts, especially if we determine that we might actually be that person responsible for our own hardships. That might be the hardest pill to swallow, until we then we understand that the only person standing between us and our happiness is indeed our self. Coming to this realization is hard. So hard, that many of us choose to do the easy thing instead: place the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of someone else.

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf illustrated this struggle pointedly with another scriptural example.

“It was our beloved Savior’s final night in mortality, the evening before He would offer himself a ransom for all mankind. As he broke bread with His disciples, He said something that must have filled their hearts with great alarm and deep sadness. ‘One of you shall betray me,’ He told them.”

“The disciples didn’t question the truth of what He said. Nor did they look around, point to someone else, and ask, ‘Is it him?’

“Instead, they were exceedingly sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, “Lord, is it I?”

In a moment when asking ‘Is it him?’ might have seemed entirely appropriate, the early disciples instead asked the harder question: “Lord, Is it I?”

Though it is not the easy path, asking the question “Is it I?” will lead us down the path of wisdom, personal mastery, and lasting change.

It takes real courage and true grit to look at yourself and admit fault. I am hopeful that we might all do better to remove the beam from our own eye while

minimize the mote in the eye of another. If, during your interactions with your family and friends, you smell a rat, don’t just follow your nose or go off a gut feeling. Avoid looking for the nearest, baddest, and smelliest rodent you can think of. Instead, consider what things are within your power to change and then change them.