Reflection

Between the Roots has me thinking about reflections. I quite often ignore my reflection. Sometimes it is because I think I am ugly. I look in the mirror and all I see are the extra pounds that fill it. I can look past everything else and somehow find exactly what I do not like. But sometimes it has nothing to do with what the mirror shows on the outside. Sometimes it is the person looking back at me in disgust because I know I have said one thing and been another. I know there are things I should do that I do not do, and there are things I hate that I still find myself doing. More often than not, I do not even realize it at the time. Sometimes I am in a mood and I just do not care. Sometimes I point something out in anger. Sometimes I am worshipping in church and my heart is not really in it at all. I am standing there singing the words, but inside I am thinking about why I got up and went in the first place. Sometimes the answer is simply that I had a job to do. Church can become routine for me. I put on the headset, watch two screens, and make sure I catch the moment. I am paying attention to what is happening, what needs to be seen, and what needs to be heard by the people watching from somewhere else. The strange part is that I can become so focused on making sure somebody else catches the moment that the actual meaning of it gets lost for me behind the headset and the screens. I can be there, doing what I am supposed to be doing, helping someone else experience the service, while barely experiencing it myself. Nobody looking at me necessarily knows the difference. From the outside, I am there. I am serving. I am worshipping. I am doing the things I am supposed to do. But I know when my heart is not in it. I know when I am going through the motions. I know when something I say comes from anger instead of love. I know when I have stopped caring, even if only for a moment. And those are the times when the reflection becomes harder to look at, because the mirror is no longer showing me something I do not like about my body. It is showing me something I do not like about who I have been. While I was writing this, I wrote, I do not do the things I should do, but I do the things that I hate. I was not trying to quote the Bible. Those were simply the words that came out while I was trying to explain what I saw in myself. Halfway through writing them, I realized they sounded familiar. Paul had written about the same struggle. In Romans 7 he says, “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” That caught me because this was Paul. The man who wrote so much of the New Testament. A missionary and teacher whose words Christians are still reading today, and yet he could still admit that there was a difference between the person he wanted to be and the person he sometimes found himself being. He knew what he believed. He knew what he wanted to do. He taught others about faith, love, forgiveness and following Christ, and still he could look at himself and admit that sometimes his actions did not line up with any of it. I think that is what makes the reflection so difficult. It is not that I expect myself to be perfect. It is that sometimes I know better. I can speak about love and then answer in anger. I can speak about worship and then go through the motions. I can talk about showing up and then show up only because it has become routine. I can believe something deeply and still fail to live it out. It would be easy to look into that mirror and decide I hate the person standing there. Sometimes I do. But I am starting to think that when I look in the mirror and do not like what I see, that is not the moment to turn away. That is the moment to ask God for help. Renew my faith. Help me be a better person. Help me walk in Jesus' footsteps. Lead me back to the path when I wander away from it. I need Him because the mirror can tell me some convincing lies. It can tell me I am ugly because of the extra pounds I see. It can tell me that because I messed up, everything I say I believe must be a lie too. It can tell me that because I failed today, I am a failure. But those are not the only things that are true about the person standing there. God made me. He loves me just as I am. That does not mean everything I do is right, and it does not mean I do not need to change. I will mess up. I will probably do things I know I should not do, and there will be other things I will not even notice until afterward. But God is still there. He forgives me, corrects me, helps me back toward the path, and encourages me not to give up. Maybe that is what I need the reflection for. Not so I can stand there and hate everything I see, but so I can recognize when I have wandered, ask God to help me, and start speaking truth instead of the lies I have been telling myself. Between the Roots, I am learning that reflection is not about liking everything I see in the mirror. Sometimes it is about knowing where to turn when I don't.