A Tainted Reflection

Psalm 119:77
Let Your tender mercies come to me, that I may live.


She caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror as she passed by the front hallway of the house. Her hair was a mess, and there was a new wrinkle forming around her eye. Time had worked against her today and assaulted her vanity. Who did she look like today? Was it her mother's eyes? Her father's complexion? The smirk on her face that her husband claimed she passed on to the next generation? Ella thought about her reflection for a minute and then pushed it out of her mind. In fact, her mind took a leap-frog approach and replaced the mental image of her face for something else...

It was her goal as a believer in Jesus to try to reflect the image of God. How was that going to be possible today? The mental build-up of junk sloshed around in her thought processes to produce a pac man mentality; moving from thought to thought quickly so that she would get to the one that seemed manageable for the moment. What was she thinking of before she slipped into the sin of vanity? She stopped and looked at the bird bath next to the split-rail fence in her backyard. There was a fresh deposit of rainwater being pushed by a passing wind. Did a bird have the experience of catching his reflection in the water today? Was the movement of the water a hindrance to his burst of vanity? Surely, the existential question of whether it was him or not in the reflection would have been answered by the sound of an approaching cat sooner or later. There were a number of feral kitties meandering around the area these days, and the immediate concern of that bird would not be so intellectual if he were apprehended by a hungry predator.

Her brain was wandering and taking a mental detour in an effort to delay dealing with reality. Catching that glimpse of herself in the mirror was a mental jolt; producing the question in her mind that pushed her to consider who she was going to reflect today. Would she be a reflection of all that the Lord had done in her life? Would she be an embarassment to the cause of Christ or a blessing to others? Where was her mind today? Would it be stuck on selfish concerns or yield to the call of the Spirit to refocus itself on Jesus? The feel of the floor beneath her feet struck her as reminder that she was caught in an earthsuit. The mission for today was to hopefully be able to crawl out of her own head and more fully engage herself in the life outside of her own thoughts. The tainted reflection in the mirror propelled her to pray that the Lord would let His tender mercies reach her today and teach her how to live for the eternal.