June 7, 2010 The Mirror of God’s Word
A two-sided mirror hangs mounted on the wall in our well-lit bathroom at home—one side provides a real-size image while the other is magnified. A light around its edges makes it even more user-friendly; even though the reflection is sometimes not what I might wish for…increasing lines, a stubborn red patch on my forehead that refuses to heal, the occasional (and gasp-producing) coarse chin hair…I use it frequently.
Contrast this with the mornings I run in town and try, still hot and sweaty, to muddle through the art of make-up application in the only adequately lit bathroom where I work. While grateful for any light, and any mirror, the result is far more likely to be…uneven.
Recently I was getting dressed at home and noticed that my face, reflected across the room in that mounted mirror, was upside down. I was at the exact distance at which the convex mirror, through mysterious laws of physics I will not attempt to explain (even Googling wasn’t much help) “flipped” the image. I wasn’t standing on the ceiling in reality, but the deceptive image made it seem so.
You’re probably way ahead of me. If James is telling us, in the passage cited above, that we have to look into the word of God and apply it, obviously the further away from the word (the “mirror”) we find ourselves, the more distorted will be our understanding and perception.
Last week I devoured The Shack by William Young, a book I had avoided since its publication in 2007. I’m not sure why I hadn’t read it—maybe the phenomenon that it became put me off. It seemed everywhere I turned someone would ask me if I’d read it yet, implying that (1) “you should” and (2) “what in the world is taking you so long?”
And…I loved it. One of the things I loved about it was that although it breaks out of the box of traditional thinking about God, it never broke out of biblical thinking. It also didn’t get bogged down trying to defend itself; it simply wove a story of love and relationship and pain and intimacy that made me wonder, more than a few times, if it really was fiction after all.
It’s important when we read, or watch television or movies, or listen to music, that we enjoy and or/critique the messages promoted with the mirror of God’s word in mind. Obviously we need a “working knowledge” of God’s word in order to function in the world as Christ-followers. And the further away we stray from it or the longer the dry spells in which we find ourselves neglecting its truth or the more frequently we find those dry spells occurring, you can be certain –as night follows day—that our ability to discern will lose its sharpness. If we get far enough away, perception can even turn upside down and become actual deception.
Permission to use with acknowledgement of source.
ellenofgillette1@aol.com
“Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act--they will be blessed in their doing (James 1:22-25, NRSV)."
A two-sided mirror hangs mounted on the wall in our well-lit bathroom at home—one side provides a real-size image while the other is magnified. A light around its edges makes it even more user-friendly; even though the reflection is sometimes not what I might wish for…increasing lines, a stubborn red patch on my forehead that refuses to heal, the occasional (and gasp-producing) coarse chin hair…I use it frequently.
Contrast this with the mornings I run in town and try, still hot and sweaty, to muddle through the art of make-up application in the only adequately lit bathroom where I work. While grateful for any light, and any mirror, the result is far more likely to be…uneven.
Recently I was getting dressed at home and noticed that my face, reflected across the room in that mounted mirror, was upside down. I was at the exact distance at which the convex mirror, through mysterious laws of physics I will not attempt to explain (even Googling wasn’t much help) “flipped” the image. I wasn’t standing on the ceiling in reality, but the deceptive image made it seem so.
You’re probably way ahead of me. If James is telling us, in the passage cited above, that we have to look into the word of God and apply it, obviously the further away from the word (the “mirror”) we find ourselves, the more distorted will be our understanding and perception.
Last week I devoured The Shack by William Young, a book I had avoided since its publication in 2007. I’m not sure why I hadn’t read it—maybe the phenomenon that it became put me off. It seemed everywhere I turned someone would ask me if I’d read it yet, implying that (1) “you should” and (2) “what in the world is taking you so long?”
And…I loved it. One of the things I loved about it was that although it breaks out of the box of traditional thinking about God, it never broke out of biblical thinking. It also didn’t get bogged down trying to defend itself; it simply wove a story of love and relationship and pain and intimacy that made me wonder, more than a few times, if it really was fiction after all.
It’s important when we read, or watch television or movies, or listen to music, that we enjoy and or/critique the messages promoted with the mirror of God’s word in mind. Obviously we need a “working knowledge” of God’s word in order to function in the world as Christ-followers. And the further away we stray from it or the longer the dry spells in which we find ourselves neglecting its truth or the more frequently we find those dry spells occurring, you can be certain –as night follows day—that our ability to discern will lose its sharpness. If we get far enough away, perception can even turn upside down and become actual deception.
Permission to use with acknowledgement of source.
ellenofgillette1@aol.com
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