The Mirror She Passes Sideways

There is a mirror in that hall and she has a way of going past it.

Not covering it. Nothing dramatic. She simply turns her head about four degrees at a particular point and looks at the coats instead, and she has been doing it for so long that it is not a decision, it is a movement, like ducking under a beam in an old house.

She uses mirrors. She is not one of those. She puts a scarf on, she checks her teeth, she does what a person does.

She looks at parts. She does not look at herself.

Here is what happened three weeks ago that she has not been able to shake.

She was in a shop with a badly angled mirror and she saw herself before she knew it was her, for about half a second, the way you catch a stranger.

And her first thought, before she recognized herself, was: she looks tired.

And her second thought, arriving about a second later, was that she has not properly looked at her own face in something like four years, and that the woman in that mirror was very slightly unfamiliar to her, and that this is a strange thing to be true about a person.

She has told nobody, because it sounds either vain or sad and it is neither.

If you go past a mirror sideways, come and sit down at this table. Nobody is going to tell you to feel better about anything.

Made is the word, and it comes before anything else

There is a verse that has been printed on so many things that it has stopped meaning anything, so let me put it back in the psalm it lives in.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.Psalm 139:14

The psalm around it is not about looks and it is not about self esteem. It is about a God who knew a person before there was any of them to know, who was present while they were being put together where nobody could see, and whose thoughts toward them outnumber the sand.

And in the middle of that, the word: made.

Not improved. Not corrected. Not needing work. Made, on purpose, by somebody who was there for it.

You were made rather than assessed, and the making came first and it came from Him. Psalm 139:14 puts the fact of being made ahead of any question about what has happened since, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands an old verse in a woman who has not looked at her own face in four years, which means the ground under you is not your reflection.

Nothing here is asking you to like it

Now let me be careful about what this article will not do, because the version of this that most people get is worse than saying nothing.

It is not going to tell you to look in the mirror and say kind things to yourself. That is somebody else's method and it makes a great many people feel like a fraud in their own hallway.

It is not going to suggest anything at all about how you look, or what you might do, or how you might feel differently by Friday.

And it is not going to tell you that four years of turning your head is a fault. It is a movement you learned somewhere, for reasons that were probably good at the time, and bodies keep the movements they learn.

What it will do is name what is actually true about the woman in the shop.

You are not a stranger to God, whatever you are to yourself at the moment. Psalm 139:2 says He knows your downsitting and your uprising and understands your thought afar off, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a verse like that a place a person can stand rather than admire, which means there is somebody who has never once had to catch you sideways in a badly angled mirror.

And this. You have a body that God calls His own dwelling, and He has been living in it for all four of those years. 1 Corinthians 6:19 calls it the temple of the Holy Spirit which you have of God, with no clause anywhere about how the person feels about it, which means the arrangement has never once depended on your being able to look.

God is the one holding you, and He was holding you in that shop for the whole half second.