On Splinters and Blades of Grass

“Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye yet fail to perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?“

Matthew 7:2

Within our first hours in Ireland, our oldest daughter got down on all fours, and like a hungry lamb, ate a mouthful of grass.

When we landed in Dublin, I dosed this exhausted seven-year old the tiniest bit of Dramamine for the long car ride to the west coast. In hindsight, I’m not sure it was a great idea. Please keep in mind that she did not sleep a minute on the red-eye flight from Charlotte to Dublin. It was her first plane ride, her first trip out of the country. She could not settle herself down to rest without mothering intervention. Within three minutes of Dramamine intake, Macy’s excitement had melted into a medication-induced puddle of drool and snoring. She slept like I had never seen her sleep before.

We woke her as we pulled into the cottage, and Macy went from a coma-like sleep to another round of frenetic excitement, running in and out of the house, screaming, racing through the sheep fields, trying to catch a lamb as her summer pet. It was hilarious to watch, but as her mom, I feared the crash that I knew was coming.

To redirect her energy, we decided to go for a little walk to Ballycarbury Castle. It was just a few yards down the lane—an ancient, royal ruin sitting on the River Fertha, dated before Christ. It was missing steps in many places and walls in almost every place, but we still climbed in and through it. We could not believe we were allowed to enter and enjoy, without admission price or tickets. We could not believe that we were the only ones there. This was Ireland.

The grass around the castle was thick, green, lush. It was Psalm 23 grass. Sheep and cattle were grazing all around us. It was all just too much for Macy.

Farm Animals. Castles. Leprechauns. Dramamine. Irish fairies. Sleeplessness. Adventure.

Dismiss the leprechauns and fairies, but they may as well have existed for how wonder-filled her heart was. I say all this to explain why my child got down on all fours, pretending to be a wild, Irish pony, grazing on some of the scrumptious grass tickling her muzzle.

“Grass is for animals, Macy, not little girls,” I said. “Let’s not do that.”

She stopped, but not before half-swallowing a few skinny blades. We left our castle and went to find dinner, or breakfast, or whatever meal it was in the new time zone. We were starving travelers.

Perhaps that was why my child was eating the lawn.

We had just sat down and ordered when an elderly, Irish chap with no teeth started speaking to us earnestly in slurred Gaelic. I’m not sure he was quite with us cognitively. Clearly, he was asking us questions by the way he would pause, waiting and staring at us with watery eyes. The ginger-haired waiter kept sending him away and apologizing to us, but the man kept wandering back, trying to communicate something important to us.

I was starting to crash, and when I crash, I lose control over what I find funny. Our family calls these moments laughing fits. I get them from my mother.

Jimmy squeezed my knee hard under the table.

It was at this point that Macy started gagging over her plate. I turned my head and saw what no mother wants to see at the dinner table—my daughter was trying to fit her whole fist in her mouth.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I have grass stuck in my throat,” she wailed, beginning to panic.

She was barking like a sea lion, trying to the get the grass either all the way up or all the way down. It was stuck in the back of her throat. She wasn’t choking, but she could feel it scraping her gullet. She started crying. My exhausted baby was frightened that the grass would be a forever nuisance.

The tears turned to screams. The old man was still talking. I kept meeting Jimmy’s eyes and saw he was losing it, too. Every time her mouth opened wide, I could see a hint of emerald green in the back, near the tonsils. The exhaustion and sleep-deprivation and foreign country were too much to carry in public.  I had not slept on the plane either, or the car ride.

When I saw the grass in her throat, I could no longer hold myself together as an adult. I just started laughing.

Not quiet laughter either—the kind that gets bigger and more obnoxious with each intake. The louder she cried, the harder I laughed. I could not stop. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I just kept picturing her eating grass like a little curly-haired goat. I started snorting, tears pouring out of my eyes. Irish people were staring at the scene around our little table. The old man had not stopped talking to me in Gaelic once.

I slid Macy out of the booth and we rushed to the bathroom, crying and laughing like a seriously dysfunctional mother-daughter unit, my voice echoing down the hallway. Once we had both calmed down (which took about ten minutes of laugh cycles), I was able to fish the bit of grass out of her throat. We quickly wrapped up our uneaten food and left. We could never eat there again, not for the whole summer.

As I read Jesus’ question in Matthew 7, this first-day-in-Ireland story comes to mind. As I read it, I see how astonishing it is to Jesus that the person with the log does not even notice said log. He has a beam stuck in his eye socket, and he is walking around offering to help others with their tiny speck of splinter.

Wouldn’t the log hurt? How can he function? How does he simply lace his sandals, let alone perform amateur surgery on his splinter-bearing companions?

My seven-year old had a skinny blade of grass caught in the back of her throat, and the whole world stopped. This is the good and honest way of children. If something hurts, if something is not right, they make it known. Macy made it clear to me and her dad and her sister and the old man and the waiter and all of the patrons at Benny’s Pub that there was something wrong, something bothering her. Life could not be lived normally until she had been de-grassed. Although we were utterly embarrassed at the scene she was making in public, she was not.

Her speck exposed the beam in me.

Things are very different in adult world. As adults, if something is not right with us, we like to pretend it does not exist. We are not going to let a little thing like a 2×4 sticking out of our eye socket, with blood dripping onto our shirt collar, keep us from doing the things we want. Who cares about the pain? It’s easier to ignore than address. Thus, we work and minister, serve and spend time with our family, all with a serious, inconvenient handicap that keeps us from being truly healthy. For each of us, the beam is different. The beam is the thing we know is lodged in our soul’s throat—but we will not do anything to get it out.

Anxiety. Wounds. Pride. Sarcasm. Distance. Dysfunction. The list goes on for acres and acres of grass.

Others can see our beam, but often, they themselves are too afraid to mention it. Besides, they have logs of their own to worry about—or not to worry about.

Jesus invites us to stop. It is okay to acknowledge the splinters and the logs that are hurting us. In fact, it is invited.

What is it that is causing pain? What is keeping me from seeing, really seeing? What is it that I am too busy or frightened or apathetic to acknowledge?

We get to be like my Macy. We get to stop trying to live with the plank in our heads and hearts.

Start wailing. Go to your Good Father. Bark like a sea lion if you must. He will work with you to remove the giant log. That is what he is waiting to do. That is what he is wanting to do. Then, and only then, we can live like Jesus, loving and seeing others well enough to help them with their splinters and beams.

Only then can we be really and truly free.