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Is That How I Really Look?

Posted by No Name on

She was an old woman, skin brown and weather-beaten to a texture of a raisin, hunched over but still strong from working the earth for a living. Her home was a hut with packed-mud walls in the highlands of Vietnam, and she did not own a mirror.

One day in the Spring she met a group of men from Hong Kong, our Men’s Fraternity Outreach team, who visited her home and chatted with her and had brought her rice, cooking oil and basic supplies as gifts.

Perhaps the greatest gift they brought that day was an image: a little screen on a digital camera where she saw herself for the first time in a very long time.

“Is that how I really look?!” she asked, intrigued and enthralled and not quite believing that this picture was actually her self.

How many times a day do you look at yourself in the mirror? Every time you go to the bathroom, at least, and probably a few more times in addition to that. We need to have that sense of our Self. We need to see how we present ourselves to the world around us.

Most of us are familiar with our physical appearance in the mirror. But how many of us are similarly aware of our spiritual self?

In James 1:23, God’s Word, the law, is likened to a mirror. It helps us know how we look spiritually and helps us present ourselves to God. It guides us, teaches us what to do and how to act. Essentially it tells us how we can be more like Christ. As you hold up the mirror of Scripture, ask yourself these questions:

Is there an action or pattern that you need to confess and overcome?

Whose example from the Bible you can emulate?

Which Godly attribute or characteristic do you need more of in your life today?

What verse do you need to claim or hold onto today?

There’s another mirror reference that I like in 1 Corinthians 13:12: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

Whatever reflection we see, whether we are satisfied with it or not, we live with the hope that it is just a dim reflection. God uses the mirror of His Word to perfect us. The best, most beautiful part is yet to come.

 

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