This past Sunday, in celebration of Mother’s Day, I was very late for church. It wasn’t that I wanted to be late to church so much, as I wanted a one day vacation from hustling everyone, including myself, out the door. This resulted in the fam and me being seated much farther back in the sanctuary than is our usual custom. You would think with four “spirited” children we would always be hiding out in the back row. Sitting in closer proximity to our pastor’s watchful eye seems to help curb our children’s rambunctiousness and if that fails, we figure “Why not make a show ourselves and at least amuse those around us with our offspring’s antics.” Or as Jane Austen puts it “What do we live for but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?”
So I am sitting in the back, looking around for someone to make sport of. Not in a mean spirited way, of course. More in a way “Wow, there is so much more to be distracted by back here” kind of way. If nothing else, I began to understand the proportionate relationship between the kids’ restlessness and our seat assignment. I’m looking around for friends, checking out what everyone is wearing when I observe an interesting trend. Our church has a fair number of college students in attendance and I notice that almost all of young women have their long, lovely college girl hair pulled to the front, framing their faces. I am sure from the front this makes for an attractive display of said tresses, but from behind it leaves a shocking gap.
This got me to thinking about the time I made the mistake of looking at my behind in the mirror. I am not one for much mirror gazing but I try to make sure my outfit works, there is nothing stuck in my teeth, etc. But one day, while jumping into the shower, I caught a glimpse of my exposed behind in the bathroom mirror. This was a big mistake! “How did that happen?!?” I wondered. Because what I saw was certainly not the delicate derriere I had been envisioning for myself these many years. It was a painful moment of clarity that humbled me, not to mention doing wonders for my dedication to working out on a more regular basis.
We all have these little blind-spots, gaps in our character that we fail to see. Sometimes we are so busy working on what we look like head on, we forget to examine ourselves from behind. We become a Flat-Stanley-cardboard-cut-out version of ourselves, one dimensional. We keep focusing on the polishing our front-side image and hoping no one looks behind the curtain at all the nasty bits.
But then one day, if we are lucky, we catch a glimpse of the nether regions of our hearts in the mirror of truth. “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like” (James 1:23-24). The Bible, along with that small, still voice in our hearts, or the louder, less still voice of a friend in our ear, is there to show us what we really look like. To refocus our efforts on the whole of our character and not just the parts that are most obvious. True, the revelation can be humbling, but without a picture of who we really are, it is doubtful we will become who we really want to be.
Ah, Crab Apples! 