What do you see when you look in the mirror??

I don't mean your physical appearance or whether your clothes and shoes match..what I really mean is what mirror do you have hanging on your wall?

Do you have a magic mirror like in Snow White that is designed to always tell you how wonderful you are? The kind of mirror that even when you know that what you have done is not right, tells you that you are beautiful anyway.

Or do you have a physical distortion mirror, the mirror sold to you by fashion magazines and media which tells you that no matter how hard you try you will never be good enough.

Or what about the parent mirror where either you look at yourself and think, hey mum, hey dad, today I will try and be the wonderful child you raised me to believe in or the one where you could never live up to their standard.

How about the mirror that overly zealous Christians set, the one where you should be constantly happy and worshipping God, or the 'to be a success' mirror where you have a high flying job, or you are an Aid worker to a foreign country. If I left a blank, you could fill it in a thousand ways couldn't you??

Or perhaps you are in the hall of mirrors at the fair, where you can never clearly know the way ahead or which reflection is really yours.

But are we too afraid to look in the clear mirror, our God mirror because we our opinions of ourselves are so low and distorted by the other mirrors that we think that we must look at our worst in our God mirror? Well I believe that looking in our God mirror is only the first step, once we get into the habit of looking in our God mirror then I believe that God wants us to shatter it!! Because I believe that truly seeing ourselves reflected in God means that we come to peace and understanding of who we are and who we are meant to be...but once we are comfortable with who we are then we need to look harder at that reflection we come to understand that not only is the reflection perfect but that is has no limits, it is fluid, changeable and all encompassing.

At that point we need to do away with the mirror completely and live this reflection out. Faith is only at its strongest when we live it out, love is only strongest when we live it out. The out-working of the effects of God on our lives are far more powerful than the effect itself. My theme of the week - WE WERE NEVER MEANT TO EXIST IN ISOLATION!

God did not create us for the purpose of living alone, so once we understand God's outpouring of love in our lives its time to start out-working the vast possibilities in our lives.