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.” 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.
Most of us have learned ways to cover up or conceal what we might call our shortcomings. We don’t want to see them in the mirror, and we certainly don’t want our friends, families and co-workers seeing those shortcomings. But Lent calls us to take an honest and deep look at ourselves, to bare our souls before our loving and forgiving God.
This message is excerpted from “Looking into the mirror,” a 2009 resource of the Women of the ELCA, written by Linda Post Bushkofsky.
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