Mirror Image

“The tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God.”

Luke 18:13-14a, NIV

A few weeks ago, I dropped off my 3-year-old daughter at school and noticed her doing something I hadn’t seen before. The front doors of her school are reflective like a mirror and teachers come and go, escorting kids to their classrooms.

On this day, my daughter got out of the car while the school doors were closed for just a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her looking at her reflection and then she took a deep breath in and smiled.

I melted. This is so precious because there is an innocence to her smiling at what she sees. I want her to feel that way about herself every single day of her life, but I know she will not always like what she sees in the mirror.

There will likely be times when she disappoints herself and cannot bear to look at her reflection. She will feel pressure as a teenager to conform to a certain body image and the doubts that she may feel about not being pretty enough, not good enough or smart enough, which will likely make her scowl at the person looking back at her in the mirror.

I’d venture to say that all of us don’t like what we see in the mirror a decent portion of our lives. The reflection we see brings a sense of shame or a reckoning with imperfections, whether that’s what we see on the outside or what we know is happening on the inside. A mirror doesn’t lie, but the voices in our head tell us so many lies about ourselves.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who's the fairest of them all?

The passage from Luke answers the all-important question: Who is justified before God? It’s the one who looks in the mirror and knows that, apart from God, we are broken and not our true selves. There is freedom when we reckon with the truth of who we are … and who we are not. Christians aren’t meant to sit around in self-pitying circles and cry, “Woe is me, the great sinner that I am!” No, we are to recognize our brokenness, our continual need for repentance and renewal, and then be in awe of what God does for us (and through us).

Bishop Bill Frey used to say, “Any good you see in me is a triumph of grace over nature.” When we look in the mirror, we should see glimmers of God’s grace that have shaped who we are in Christ. We are a work in progress, but this revelation of grace should lead us to lives of endless gratitude (and righteousness). And when that happens, we become a mirror of grace to others.