The Story in the Mirror

Sometimes I have to smile when I look in the mirror.  Not in a wow-I-can’t-believe-I’m-so-pretty way.

No, I sometimes have flashbacks to a previous chapter in my life.  If you were to compare me then and now, you might not notice very much of a difference in my appearance.

Two or three years ago, I was a head-covering, skirts-only kind of girl.

Now let me emphasize that none of that is evil, and I believe it can be done for commendable reasons.  I myself choose to live by those convictions because I truly wanted to please God.

There’s nothing like looking back over one’s path, only to realize that somewhere along the way, a small misstep led down a road one never set out to travel on.

Whatever my motivation had been in the beginning, I eventually found that my thinking was far removed from the realm of a Spirit-led life.  My focus had shifted from Christ alone to what I thought I had to do in order to please Him.  I was a Pharisee.  I was placing myself squarely under Law and disregarding Grace.  And I didn’t even know I was doing it.

But God does not leave His children alone to blunder on forever.  He has promised to finish the work He started, and He will nudge and prick and chip away to accomplish that work.

He nudged and pricked.  He pried from my heart the things that I had clung to as both the means and the measure of my spiritual growth.

It was painful and sometimes frightening.  But in the end I stood, minus my veneer of goodness, and the truth was nearly blinding: God loved me without all that.  He loved me, not because of who I was or what I did, but because He is love.

He loves me.  I do not deserve it, and that is precisely why it’s called grace: undeserved favor.

 

* * * 

In a way, grace has brought me full-circle.

Today, as I live here in West Africa, you’ll find me once again attired in skirts and (often) a scarf wrapped around my head. 

But now I don’t do it because I think it makes me better.  I don’t do it because I think God will like me better that way.  I do it because skirts are cooler, because I like scarves, and because both are frequently worn by the women here.  (And frankly, some days it’s just a lot easier to throw on a scarf than to fuss with my hair.)

When I look in the mirror, it is not myself that I’m struck with.  It is grace.  Grace has changed me on the inside, changed the reason I do things, changed the way I live in God’s presence.

 

Sometimes the freedom makes me want to throw my head back and laugh. 

And from my decidedly feminine perspective, I kind of think the scarves are a good reminder of grace after all.  Their splash of color and loveliness and the way they can brighten up an outfit…it’s a little like the splash of beauty and brightness that grace brings to our lives.

(Sorry guys, you’ll have to come up with your own analogies.)