The Mirrors in Our Hands

And the One Way to Know Who We Really Are

While I waited in the car, I texted my college-age daughter, “We need to go!”

A few minutes later she climbed into the backseat with her makeup bag and phone. In my rearview mirror, I could see her applying makeup, except she wasn’t holding a mirror in her hand. She was holding up her phone.

“Why are you holding your phone like that?” I asked.

“I’m using it as a mirror. This is how all my friends put on makeup.”

Huh. I never thought of doing that. I guess it made sense, but it still seemed strange. I imagined teen girls everywhere, using the reverse camera lens on their phones to apply makeup. In more ways than one, our phones are like little black mirrors, reflecting our image back to us.

But our phones aren’t the only mirrors in our lives.

The world loves to offer us a variety of manmade mirrors in an attempt to tell us who we are. For some of us, we may see our jobs as a reflection of our true selves, conflating what we do with who we are. For others of us, we may look to our spouses or our kids as a reflection of who we are. We see their accomplishments as our accomplishments, or their failures as our failures.

Books on personality types are like a mirror, too. After taking a quick assessment, we turn to the section that tells us about our type. We gaze into the chapter hoping to catch a reflection of who we really are. For me, a good report card at school was my mirror of choice. Maybe for you it was something else.

We all have certain “mirrors” we look to, hoping to glean greater insight into who we are.

Every manmade mirror, however, communicates an image that impacts how we view ourselves and the world around us, and oftentimes these reflections are like a house of mirrors, distorted and unreal.

But there is another house that is not a house of mirrors, but a house where the focus is such a sweet relief because the focus isn’t on us, but on Christ.