ABSORBING THRUSTS OF FLICKERING FANCY

What silvery caricature of life resides in your conscience? I‘m speaking in perhaps a tad verbose manner of one’s self image. Which in relationship to the title is the mechanics of thought we use to mold the view we sculpt of ourselves.

And as a veteran artist of years of sculpting a negative self image I appreciate how we all never see ourselves as others see us. Sometimes our view is distorted for the better, others for the worse. But what is amazing to me is even when we have shaped ourselves a negative view of our lives, we still set boundaries on that image.

By that I mean, we might look in the mirror and see someone who is ugly, unappealing or any number of other negative elements, but it doesn’t mean we enjoy or want others to criticize us. There are limits on the negativity we want to accept. Thus one can have bad self-image in terms of some part of life, but feel pride in a different portion. It is all part of the complex umbrella of thoughts and desire we use to shelter us from the storms of life.

With Christianity, God desires us to see ourselves as we are in the mirror. The real person, not the one we squint to pretend is there.

And if we are listening to the Holy Spirit, God will open our eyes to the reality with all its beauty and ugliness. Only the Lord does it for our own good. He wants us to see what he sees. In order that we will truly understand our need for forgiveness and why we should trust to him for our needs and what is in our best interests.

God’s mirror is made from grace and love. It is not one made to humiliate us or deceive us in anyway. However that doesn’t mean what he wants us to see will always be a pleasant image.

That is until we see it covered in the blood of our Lord and Savior and then we can know how it will look in eternity, full of light and praise. Which is the promise eternal that should allow us to see what Satan would help veil our eyes with lies so we don’t have to look upon the real nakedness of our soul and heart.

Sadly too often in houses of worship they only contribute to the process of avoiding seeing what God would want us to see in his mirror. They want to offer up their own mirror, which will distort our image to look like their view of being a Christian. It doesn’t matter what mirror they are offering up, legalism, living by their terms, whatever the mirror unless it has God’s reflective coating of grace and forgiveness the image we will see will never be the one God wants us to see, which is the sinful person we are in need of forgiveness.

Our mind can easily thrust the fancy of denial into our mirror so what our eyes choose to see is whatever reflection fits out inner needs. And if we find a ministry that will allow us to make the reflection sound like it is perfect then it only allows us to maintain that same view regardless of what is true. Satan will of course encourage us to keep savoring that “approved” reflection of conformity.

Hopefully, we can manage to not absorb those deceptions as truth and to instead let God open our eyes to what he sees. It might be painful at first, but in the end, any ugliness we fear to see will be washed beautiful by the blood of Jesus Christ. I pray we have eyes to see the mirror as only God’s light can shine upon it.