Lose a friend lose God? Part III

So, I have talked about the importance of friendships in your relationship with God, and have talked about seeing a glimpse of God in the relationships around you.

In this "episode" I want to talk about a passage in Scripture. Matthew 7:3-6 says:

3"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

I always used to view this as a commentary against being judgemental, realizing that it's hypocritical to judge the faults of someone when in reality, you are full of enough of your own faults. While this is very true, I realized something about 10 years ago having to do with the mechanics of how our eyeballs work.

Experiment time.....try this. You can either gaze into someone else's eye, or stare at your own in a mirror.

This is how the human eye works:

The first step in how your eye works is the light from the outside world traveling to your eye.

The light then enters the eye through the pupil and travels to the cornea.

The cornea then focuses the light upon the lens.

The lens further focuses the light on the retina. The image is flipped over and spread across the back of the retina. The retina then carries the light signals to the brain via the optic nerve.

This is the interesting part. If you look into someone else's eye, in good light, you will see what they see, flipped over. When you see into someone's eye, you can see yourself....tiny and upside down.

Let's get back to Jesus' example in Matthew. Let's just assume you literally had a plank in your eye (and hadn't previously noticed the seering pain that comes with a log stuck in your eye) and you were face to face with a friend and you leaned in close to tell them something serious, then noticed what looked like a speck of sawdust in their eye.

That "sawdust" you would be looking at would actually be a tiny, flipped over mirror image of the pine tree protruding from your own eye. Jesus' point was that when you see something in someone that bothers you, realize that it's just a minute reflection of a large problem in your own life.

Our friends, especially when their character flaws get on our nerves, are Jesus' way of communicating to us.

If I'm not involved in close friendships, I won't have the opportunity to see myself and my faults that God wants me to work on. He uses the lamp of their eyes to illuminate the areas of my life He wants to give me the grace to improve.

Yes, if I lose a friend, I lose that communcation from God, through their eyes. If I lose a friend, I lose God.

Stay tuned to see what C.S. Lewis and Lord of The Rings has to say about finding God in our friendships.