Mirror, Mirror

This year, I have really felt God speaking to me in ways that are louder and more noticeable than normal. (At least, I hope it's Him and not me just attributing my own thoughts to His voice...) Anyway, I think that in this, He is honoring a request of mine. At the begging of this year, I felt Him asking me to evaluate what I was actively, tangibly doing to contribute to the Kingdom. Not just "being nice" or "trying to love" or "being a witness with my life"or all those other things we say to ease our guilt over Kingdom laziness. But what was I presently, purposefully doing to make a real contribution to Kingdom work? What was I doing right then that, when I stood before Him, would be worth mentioning?

Not to minimize the value and true merit of working towards holy living in a daily way, but really, the answer was.... kind of.... nothing. Not really....

I thought about starting to pray that God would provide ways for me to begin being a powerful worker for Him, but what I decided instead was to pray for God to show me the things in my life that were currently keeping me from it and to help me to start changing those.

he has showed me many things, but the biggest and most important, I think, has been about identity. I feel that He keeps sending me the world Identity. He spoke to me through a book called The Mirror Effect (Pinsky). (It isn't a Christian book! Could He possibly use that?? Who can say...)

This book talks about a mirror effect, in which everyone around you serves always and only as a mirror. In your eyes, people aren't really who they are, but they're just mirroring back to you who YOU are. You look at someone, and their opinion of you tells you who you are. If a professor likes you and gives you a good grade, you're (in your own eyes) smart and good. If your boss at work doesn't like you and criticizes you, you're (in your own eyes) bad. If you make a new friend who seems to like you, you're lovable. If you get dumped, you're disgusting. If you get a promotion, you're valuable. If your date stands you up, you're worthless. And on and on and on, with every interaction, every new opinion.

There is no sense of "this is who I am, this is always who I am, regardless of what happens during the day" - what happens during the day is what tells you who you are.

When babies are developing, they earn object permanence. This means the understanding that, if your mom walks out of the room, she's not gone, she's just away. If you have a toy, and then the toy is put behind someone's back, it isn't vanished, it's hidden, but still there. The fact that babies don't have it for a while is what makes a game like peek-a-boo fun. They can't see you, so they think you've really gone away. But as they grow, it is important that they learn object permanence, so they understand that, even though they can't see something, it isn't gone forever. It isn't completely changed. The change is situational, not forever.

I say this because, with the mirror effect (and with me!), there is very little object permanence with your identity. There is little sense that, this is who I am, and even if a circumstance changes or someone's opinion changes or something good or bad happens, who I am is constant.

What results is a severely selfish mindset in which no one has any value, except to tell you about yourself. It also results in an identity that has no permanence, but is constantly shaped and reshaped by the whims and opinions and feelings of absolutely everyone. And there are lots of people. And they rarely agree. So your identity and worth are never stable. It's very stressful.

Anyway, what I think He has been telling me is that my identity has been very unstable. I am very little object permanence with it.

I have seen in myself that I allow my own performance and my situations and other people's emotions and opinions to all be my mirrors - that is how I will define myself. What I felt God telling me, though, is that He gave me a mirror. The Bible is supposed to be my mirror. In it, I see that I am beautiful, cherished, lovable, desired, sought after, worth dying for - and this identity is as unchanging as the Book that presents it. I think that God wants us to know that who we are and how we are defined should be a stable thing that doesn't shift. And when it is rightly based in Him and His, all of a sudden, that is possible. What other people think and what happens to us and how we perform are all certainly things that matter and that should often be taken seriously and dealt with, but they are just that: things to deal with, flashes in the pan that pass as quickly as the time that contains them. They can be important things, maybe even Kingdom things, but they do not define who we are in the yes of God, and should therefore not define who we are in our own eyes.

I feel like I should have a wrap up point, but I guess I don't. I just feel like God has showed this to me about myself, and I think it's worth noting.