The Mirror

“…He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into…a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness.”

-from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

When we are forced to view the mirror of truth, the one that reveals all we believed to be “others” flaws, we often respond as the fictitious vampire to the sun. That is to say with a hiss and an arm held up before our faces to protect us from the reflection of truth as we flee into the safety of the shadows.

When one is revealed to oneself, it is up to the person to stare long and hard at the revelation or to flee in abject terror from the horror before ones eyes. It is horrible, do not mistake this, for there is great darkness within our souls, darkness that can’t be guessed at. We have a tendency to drift. I will not excuse the unfaithful here, but we have the ability to forget the virtues of a person in a time of abandonment or to forget their loyalty in a time of silence. We have a tendency to speak when we are filled with jealousy or hurt or spite and send bitterly laced words upon unsuspecting, sometimes “deserving”, people. We have a natural way about us that glazes over our imperfections in the dim lighting of the hallway of our judgment and we tend to be harsher to those we love than those we don’t.

We disguise our hateful, barbed words under the guise of “just letting someone know” and we speak cruelly just because we are “frustrated” or “hurt” but never because we’re cruel and want to cause someone else pain. If one would look at their true intentions when they cause hurt to course through someone’s soul, they would find that their intentions were to hurt or shock the person.

What we fail to see is what we need to see most of all. And we need to decide where our love truly lies and if we possess love at all.

“Every man, not very holy or very arrogant, has to ‘live up to’ the outward appearance of other men: he knows there is that within him which falls far below even his most careless public behaviour, even his loosest talk. In an instant of time – while your friend hesitates for a word – what things pass through your mind? We have never told the whole truth. We may confess ugly facts – the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity – but the tone is false. The very act of confessing – an infinitesimally hypocritical glance – a dash of humour – all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned into words. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues – like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his ‘bad days’ and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside.”

-from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis

It’s amazing to me how easily I excuse the bad within me, offering up pacifist reasons for me to remain as I am or for me to alleviate the guilt of what I’ve allowed or done. In my logical moments, rare as they are, when the looking glass of truth is held up before my face, I see the horrible person that I am, saved only by the grace and love of God and Jesus, and I know that there is so much more buried down deep that I cannot see. I always believed I was a good person, that I was “better” than others because of what I didn’t do, even though I had a horribly short fuse and depression and bitterness and unforgiveness fouling up my soul. It was only last year that I was fully able to see the true value placed on those around me by the One who loves us all so much.

As I become healed of my anger and my past hurts, I marvel at the ability of others to refuse to sacrifice. I can’t think of a better word than that. It amazes me how we all walked away from that which satisfied us so much and chose the things of this world that leave one empty and sorrowful. I was trying to puzzle out what was going on and God revealed to me the truth behind all of our excuses. What we are really saying when we say things like “I don’t know how to change” or “I don’t have time” or “I’m not where you are yet” is “I refuse”.

I refuse to put forth the effort to battle against this strategy to pull me away from You and I refuse to fight for You and I refuse to let go of the things of this world in order to be with You. I refuse to sacrifice for You.

“He warned people to ‘count the cost’ before becoming Christians. ‘Make no mistake,’ He says, ‘if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push Me away. But if you do not push Me away, understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect – until My Father can say without reservation that He is well pleased with you, as He said He was well pleased with Me. This I can do and will do. But I will not do anything less.’

“And yet – this is the other and equally important side of it – this Helper who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty. As a great Christian writer (George MacDonald) pointed out, every father is pleased at the baby’s first attempt to walk: no father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son. In the same way, he said, ‘God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy’.

“On the one hand, God’s demand for perfection need not discourage you in the least in your present attempts to be good, or even in you present failures. Each time you fall He will pick you up again. And He knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal. That is what you are in for. And it is very important to realise that. If we do not, then we are very likely to start pulling back and resisting Him after a certain point.

“…all the time He knew His plan for us and was determined to carry it out. Something the same is now happening at a higher level. We may be content to remain what we call ‘ordinary people’: but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility: it is laziness and cowardice. To submite to it is not conceit or megalomania; it is obedience.”

-from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

We let fear and lies dominate our lives. Fear that we will fail, fear that we will not measure up, fear of the pain of the pruning of our lives, lies about our worth, lies about our compromises and our sins, lies about our relationship with Jesus and God. We produce excuses like a factory mass producing a product for the public. And meanwhile we are ‘content’ to sit in sorrow and in filth because we refuse to do what we are called to do and become who we are called to become.

The world makes it so easy to allow things into your life without a second thought. It’s okay to have drinks because it’s all about relaxing and having a good time and we know that you’ve been stressed out at work or we know the pressure to fit in. Go ahead. Indulge a little. It won’t kill you.

The serpent told Eve the same thing in the garden, that eating the fruit wouldn’t kill her, that touching the fruit wouldn’t kill her. It may not have done so instantly in the physical sense but it killed her spiritually and brought death into the world.

It’s okay, the world insists, to live with your significant other because we all have needs, we’re all human, and everyone needs to experiment in their lives, how else will you learn what is out there and what you want and need if you don’t try out a few things first? How will you know if you can be married if you don’t try living together first?

It’s okay, the world states, for you to cheat on your spouse if your not attracted to them anymore or aren’t satisfied at home. It’s okay to abort your unborn child because it will be inconvenient for you to have one. It’s okay to be angry because you are the most important person here and how dare they do that to you. It’s okay to never forgive this person because they never should have hurt you. It’s okay to seek vengeance on someone, to cause them pain, because they disregarded your feelings, after all.

“We must guard against the feeling that there is ’safety in numbers’. It is natural to feel that if all men are as bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excusable. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at the school feel till they lean that there are other schools where ninety per cent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human society – some particular school, college, regiment or profession where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (‘Everyone does it’) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad society we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our ‘normal’ was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our ‘Quixotic’ was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the ‘pocket’ now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil – an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection.”

-from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis

We have gotten so use to our excuses and our reasons for remaining how we are or for returning to how we were that it is natural for us to allow others to do the same. We utter our own excuses aloud to justify their behaviors. And, we believe that we are right and doing justly by doing so. So, the mirror of truth reflects all that lies within the hearts of men and women:

hatred
loneliness
despair
rage
ruin
decay
death
evil thoughts
adulteries
fornications
murders

If we are honest and repentant when the mirror reflects our true self, then we can be redeemed and set free. If, however, we excuse that which the mirror reflects or refuse to acknowledge its truth, we are rejecting Jesus’ gift of redemption and His love.

One must be honest with oneself. What do you see in the mirror?

“All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction.”

-from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis

To him that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

-Revelation 2:17

~ by mystdancer50 on March 9, 2008.