I have a love/hate relationship with mirrors. I love that a mirror helps point out what I need to fix, but I also hate how a mirror points out what I need to fix. This nose, these big eyes, these dark spots I can’t pray away…yep, it’s all there looking back at me and putting on blast all my imperfections.
A lot of times I look in a mirror and I wish that I could see exactly what God sees when He looks at me. I’ve thought about this a lot since seeing myself as God sees me has never been something I’ve excelled at.
In the imaginary Key I’ve created in my mind (and the Key I wish I saw in the mirror) I don’t settle. I wake up super early with this bright attitude and I’ve started the day in deep prayer. I work out, I’m a good cook, I’m always kind and pleasant, and I take bad days with the whole glass half full outlook.
Real Key ain’t nothing like that. I wake up and hurriedly give God a quick “thank you and/or I love you,” I track down Ethan in the house and bark at him about an unmade bed or being late for virtual school (how the heck can you be late for virtual school when all you gotta do is put on a shirt and wipe the slob off your mouth??) and I log into work and just try to make it through the day. Yes, I know I’m blessed. Yes, I know God is good. Yes, I wish I could really pull it together a lot better than I do, but at the end of a long day, I hesitantly make my way to the mirror, recount my failures, and say to myself that there’s always tomorrow.
In the mirror, I see the screwups..I see how I should have talked to Ethan softer; I see how lonely I feel even with a house full of people. In the mirror, I see how I’m getting older and more fearful. I see that as much as I want to trust God with every single part of my life, I don’t. In the mirror, I question what the heck God was thinking choosing to love someone like me.
I should learn how to tell the mirror to shut up.
Ephesians 1:4-5 (NLT):
4 Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. 5 God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.
God—amazing, wonderful, makes no mistakes God—loved me, chose me, and adopted me as His very own. Not just that, He takes pleasure in loving me, choosing me, and adopting me as His own.
That’s insane.
I get so busy being stuck in my own head and why this didn’t work out or why my life isn’t like so and so’s life that I miss just how much I’m loved by the Creator of EV-ERY-THING. Because I said yes to Jesus Christ, I have a brand-new life. I can’t erase my past, and yes, I know I’ll do some dumb stuff in the future, but when God looks at me, He’s not looking at me with my critical and negative view, He’s looking at me through HIS eyes; eyes that love me, that tell me I belong to Him, and that reassure me that everything is going to be ok.
I get really really tough on myself. Maybe you do, too. Maybe you’re a person that just hates what you see when you look in the mirror. Here’s some advice (and I need to follow this myself)—the next time you look in the mirror, remind the you looking back that you are loved, you are chosen, you are God’s. Things happen and we make mistakes, but God is never changing and always present. Ask Him for the clarity you need to see yourself as He sees you. And tell that lying mirror to shut up. You know who you are, and God won’t let you forget it.
