I’ve been peaking, and I didn’t even plan it.  Suddenly, with only one week to go or life without a mirror, I have found myself peeking…catching glimpses of the top of my head, a piece of my face, or a distant look at my body coming at a mirror.  Amazing.  I wasn’t doing that before, and it feels like it is my way of getting ready to be back in the world of mirrors.  I’m not sure I’m ready for that, but I am sure that I want to look at my hair when I fix it in the mornings. That part (not seeing my hair) has been bothersome.

I learned there are some things I couldn’t do when not looking in mirrors:

Get my hair cut (can’t avoid the mirror in the salon)

Pick out a new pair of glasses

Buy a shirt

Put on some of my makeup (became a minimalist)

Do yoga (4 walls of mirrors in studio)

There’s more, but you get the gist…  Mirrorless living put some limits on my life.

But there were also some freedoms…I didn’t really care much about all the exterior things of life because I didn’t see them.  “Seeing is believing” had a new meaning for me…I chose to see less of me and more of the world around me.  And that has been a wonderful journey.

But now I’m peeking…Getting ready to return on Sunday morning.  Somethings I will not do again.  I will only try on one outfit in the morning.  I will keep my dressing routine to 15 minutes (how liberating that is!).  I will remove many of the mirrors in my house (don’t need that many).  I will not look in the bathroom mirror every time I wash my hands…

I loved this journey, though at times it has been frustrating.  I really need to buy some summer tops…  Mostly, it has been fantastic.  I hope you give it a try sometime.  It could change you…  I could make you see life differently…

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. I Corinthians 13:12

I love this picture because it is gives an awesome visual of the heavy load we tend to carry…the burden that is so great it holds us back, pulls us down, and topples us over. That is the weight of seeing all of life from the reflection of a mirrored soul.

We forget sometimes that the mirror is not real.  It is not us.  It is only a lighted reflection of what we look like on the outside…it does not carry the glimpse of our soul…our inner true self.

In this time in life when we are being taught to value the external so highly…yes, we are being taught that by social media, by advertising, and by cultural messages…the heaviness of the external can become more than we can bear.

But what if we lighten the load and found time to listen to the voice of God within us?  What if we released all that is heavy and overbearing and allowed for the lightness of joy to fill us?  What if we gave up trying to externalize what we are not, and found comfort living the inner self?

We were not made to bear burdens larger than we were built for.  We were created to reflect the light of God, and not the light of ourselves.

Mirrorless living is wonderful.  I can’t tell you if my hair looks right or if I have leftover breakfast in my teeth…but I can tell you that I don’t care much (someone I love will tell me if I need fixing…) and that this sure makes the burden of life lighter.

Jesus said it this way,

Come to me all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and i will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you.  Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke fits perfectly, and the burden I give you is light. (Matthew 11:28-30)

So I have successfully come to the place where it is my habit to avoid mirrors.  It is not so hard anymore.  I instinctively look ahead and take note if a mirror is coming in my direction, and I have the habit of looking down or away when one is right before me.  I go most days without seeing my reflection in a mirror.

But it has been more difficult to avoid reflections in objects.  In the metallic spout of my kitchen faucet, in windows bathed in sunshine, on the computer screen, in my coffee cup, and even in the chocolate brown eyes of my friend.  Wow.  I never noticed that before!  We are reflected in the things and people around us.

Which, if you think about it, is true for life.  Our things are reflections of who we are, and our friends are reflections of who we are.  It never seemed more true than now.  When God asked us to take care of the earth and the people in it, I wonder if God understood that in caring for them, we would be working on the reflection of our own souls.  I wonder if God made reflections to occur so many places in the world around us so that we would not forget how connected we are…that we are the same as those around us, for better or worse, and that we will never be left alone…for our good.

What is continue to rise up is a demanding emotion to be myself without outward distractions.  To be real and true and to be comfortable in my own soul.  I can’t even begin to tell you how good that feels. Sometimes we get distracted by our outward self, to the point of forgetting our true self.  This whole journey makes me wish everyone could do it.  But especially I would love it if someone who makes a living on their looks could do this.  Say, what if Madonna, or the Kardashian’s, or Beyonce, went without a mirror…how might that change them?  The other group I would like to see go without a mirror for a time would be all CEO’s and heads of institutions.  What if all the Pastors and Bishops went without a mirror for a time?  And how about teens?  What things would rise up from the inside?

On the other hand, then there are those I would like to hold up a mirror to.  I would love for the homeless folk, those who walk the streets of our cities, to look in the mirror so they can see their beauty and the spark of light in their eyes.  And children, who really don’t care too much about mirrors…I would love for them to see that their light shines so bright and see how their reflection of that light changes the world. And the women who have been beaten down…I would love for them to study the mirror and find their strength within it.

I don’t know what it will be like when I look into the mirror again.  But I do know that this journey is fascinating, and that it is worth the growing pains, the inconvenience, and the diversions tactics.  This road is rising up to quiet down the outside understanding of life, and to put a megaphone on the inside voice of the heart….and it is a journey of deep connection.

Proverbs 17:19 says best:

Just as water reflects the face, so one human heart reflects another.

26 days to go…

Well this week I travelled to Nashville and had a new venture of avoiding mirrors.  I found mirrors in these places:

Bathrooms, hotel lobby, airport walls, airplane bathrooms (hard to avoid that one), restaurants, hotel room (couldn’t cover them all), meeting rooms, coffee shop, book store, shoe store, the sunglasses of my friends (I asked them to remove them so I could look their way), mirrored/glassed exterior of buildings, and I probably missed a few.  Also, I found that my reflection peeked my way in windows, shiny cars, and other sun-reflecting surfaces.

I found some tricks to avoid mirrored spaces.  One is leave the lights off in rooms with mirrors…this decreases your desire to be in that room and reminds me that it is a place to avoid.  Also, I throw towels over mirrors (in hotel rooms).  I look ahead more…to make sure I don’t find an unexpected trap.  And I look down more.  The street doesn’t have mirrors.

Interesting to travel and not care what I wore.  I just threw in what was comfortable.  In fact, I am more and more picking clothes that are just comfortable.  I have added uncomfortable clothes to my “give away” pile…

I had my whole day without seeing my reflection on the 7th day.  Since then, I have had a few more, but it doesn’t happen often that I can get through a day without seeing myself.  But at least now I am not habitually going to check out my reflection in the mirror…

The experiment is getting tiresome.  Sometimes I just want to see my eyes.  Other times I find that I am finding something wonderful below the anxiety.  A true ease with self is rising strong.  And a leaning on others.  I have asked my husband if I look stupid in this outfit…he says “No!”, which is what he has always said, so go figure that it makes me feel better.  Tiresome, and giving in to something beneath the surface, and a desire to continue even though I simultaneously want to throw this experiment out the window.

There are 10 mirrors in my house.

34 days left to go…

So far I haven’t made it one day without seeing myself in the mirror.  A few times, I just looked in a mirror that I passed by.  When that happened, I felt shocked by my blunder.  How could I do that?  What a huge habit ingrained.  I thought looking in the mirror would be easy to give up.  Instead, I am totally frustrated!

The other problem is that mirrors are everywhere, and I forget to watch out for them.  I go to the bathroom, and there is a mirror.  I walk in a restaurant and there is a mirror.  I have thought about staying home more where I can control my environment…but that doesn’t seem like a good solution.

Getting ready in the morning is still more fun.  Less time.  Less attention.  I am thinking about even nixing makeup totally…I can’t see what I look like, so why bother? I do get frustrated that I can’t see the final result of fixing my hair…

There is an unease that goes deep.  But it is an unease that is pushing me to see something on the inside… a quiet voice that is being heard from the depth of my soul.  I can’t explain it fully yet, but I can feel it.

I am becoming more aware of the world of mirrors we live in.  It seems like mirrors are coming at me from everywhere…like I’m in a game of Dodge Ball, but there are 100 places to dodge a day…

more later…gotta go to church.

Well, first of all, I can tell you that it’s not so hard to hang towels and sheets over your mirrors with a little packing tape.  Funny, how many mirrors in the house…I just concentrated on the ones in my dressing area and bathroom.  The others I will just avoid.

Second, it takes so much less time to get dressed in the morning.  My usual routine of trying on 4 or 5 outfits till I find the right one, was over.  First outfit was just fine! Don’t know how it looks, really, but can’t be that bad…

The make-up routine was also cut in half.  Put on less…  I did get the mascara on, by feeling the edges of my lashes with the mascara wand.  Hopefully no smudges… Overall, getting ready in the morning was a breeze without the mirror.  Since I don’t really like this part of my day, I was quite pleased.

Found it weird to have to dodge mirrors.  Conscious of how they are everywhere. Bathroom at work…just kept my focus down on the faucet… My hunch was right:  we have mirrors everywhere in our society.

So far, not so bad…