Inaccurate Mirrors

I have two mirrors that I look in most every day. One is in my closet and one is in my bathroom. There is a slight difference in the image projected from those mirrors. The one in my closet makes me look a bit thinner than the one in my bathroom. Guess which one I like best? I´m not sure if either of them is accurate, but I like the way the one in my closet makes me look. It makes me feel better about myself than the other one. I like to think that it is the accurate one and that the other one is somehow warped throwing off a fatter image of myself. Neither of them are like a fun house mirror...making me look unusually tall and thin or short and fat. They are not way off of reality, just a little. I´m not really sure which one is wrong or if both of them are, all I know is that I like the way one makes me look better than the other.

Yesterday as I was looking at myself in my closet mirror I thought about what the book of James in the Bible tells us. James says that God´s Word is like a mirror. We can look at it and get an accurate picture of ourselves. (James then goes on to tell us that we need to do something with that knowledge....not just see ourselves for who we are, but allow Him to change us into who He wants us to be...but I´ll save that part for another blog.) The Bible shows us what we look like to God. It is the Perfect Standard that reveals exactly who we really are not what we would like to be or what we want to think we are. Many of us might like to have something a bit kinder that makes us look a little better not showing so many (read: all) of our faults. Something like the mirror in my closet. We might not like to be faced with our reality. We don´t like to see that there are things that need to be changed, places where we don´t measure up. I think this is why so many disregard what the Bible says. They don´t like what they see when they look into it, so they decide to use something else to measure their lives by....public opinion, conventional wisdom, other´s ideas or even their own thoughts about what is right.

When I look in my closet mirror I like what I see. When I look at the mirror in my bathroom I see that I have more work that needs to be done. The same is true when I look into the Perfect Law of Liberty. I see that I have lots to change before I look like Christ and the more I look into the mirror of the Bible the more I see in me that needs work. However, I am grateful for the accurate picture of myself presented in it´s pages.

I´d like to believe that my closet mirror shows the accurate picture of me, but I don´t know for sure. I´m glad to know that the mirror I use to evaluate my inner self is without flaw.