Lent is about looking into the mirror. Not the compact in your purse or the mirror above the bathroom sink, and not the big mirrored doors in a hotel room that show more than you might care to see. It’s not even the 360-degree mirror made famous by the TV show “What Not to Wear.”
The mirror of Lent creates reflections even larger than that, for as author Annie Dillard reminds us, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
To ask questions about how we give, how we pray, and how we care for our neighbor is to hold a metaphorical mirror up to our souls. It is to lay open and bare before God our very lives, including all the things we hide from others and even that which we try to hide from ourselves.
One of the ways we enter into this soul-searching reflection is in the extended confession of sins in the Ash Wednesday liturgy that begins the Lenten period. What will you see when you look into the mirror?
This message is taken from the free Women of the ELCA resource, Looking into the Mirror: A Lenten Reflection.
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