After much pondering on the subject, I’m not sure what I think of mirrors.

On the one hand, they are extremely useful, as I discovered one night last year when I had to rush to the loo with a dodgy stomach after a large supper with friends, cutting them short mid sentence in my haste to get there. It was then that I discovered that hours earlier, as I was making the fire roar, a fairly large flaky piece of ugly soot had floated on to my forehead without me noticing, staining my skin and looking unsightly. Interestingly, my guests didn’t point this out before I had noticed myself, as I caught my reflection in the mirror as I rushed into the loo. 
Even if I feel awkward for doing so, I always point out such things with others, and appreciate it when they also tell me, although it backfired once at a party for a friend of mine, as he, taking liberty in a caring way, tried to flick/pull a short white hair from the top of my nose, then to his horror discovering it was actually firmly attached to my skin.             :/ . I have hair growing in pretty weird places sometimes and need a mirror to find them before anyone else does, to save all of us from embarrassment! Such experiences have now caused me to scour my face before I go out to a party, since that happened. Haha.

I want to say however, that I try not to look TOO hard into a mirror these days, despite their usefulness to groom and stay tidy. I am very aware of their continual seducing draw, calling for me to just give up my resistance and simply just gaze at myself for a period of time, especially into the depths of my own eyes. I have learned over the years to avert myself from studying myself like this, focusing only on the parts of my face that need attention at the time, for the shortest amount of time possible, trying to use the wretched reflection I see as a utility for the benefit of others, rather than for self-absorption. 
It’s a strange thing that I can sometimes be absolutely disgusted with how I look in a mirror, as I see the age creeping in, and the imperfection of death taking an obvious grip on me as each day passes. In my youth, I admit that I used to love gazing at my face in a mirror, because I honestly saw beauty there, and it deeply interested me to study myself back then. I think it comes with immaturity, if I’m honest… maybe you can relate. Shaving was always an interesting past time for me for this reason, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons I keep a big nasty beard these days (apart from trying to hide a double chin, or just out of pure laziness). I have always been a contemplative person, and looking at myself in this absorbed way caused me to meditate as I gazed, wondering what this person actually was or who I COULD be, and wondering how others may see me; although after all is said and done, I know there was a strong touch of Narcissus in me, that had simply just fallen in love with my own reflection, sometimes finding it hard to draw myself away from it as I would catch myself in something like a shop window or someone’s photo. 
These days, video has become the major source of temptation, as I continue with a YouTube channel, and have to record myself talking to the audience, yet studying and scrutinising myself in pre-production to make sure I am still presentable, and even desirable to look at.

Oh, wretched man that I am.

All the real narcissism changed when I came to know Christ however, because He stripped away my unhealthy love of my self and my image (idol?) and made my spiritual eyes focus instead on eternity, and looming death. My pride took a severe beating upon the first proper acknowledgement of my foul sin; I loathed who I had become when I realised for the first time that my narcissism was a large part of how I seduced, charmed and manipulated others to get what I wanted. 
He still caused me to appreciate what He had made in me, though by seeing myself from an entirely different angle. It was now with the eyes of reality, the piercing eyes of truth. 
By humbling me, as I aged onward, I had to come to terms with and deal with an extremely hairy body (much more than most) and the dreaded baldness, both very unattractive to my artistic eye; I don’t mind admitting that I had always despised it in others, always hoping it would never happen to me. What a blow to the ego, praise the Lord. It was the same with putting on weight; I had always been afraid of being fat in the past, and starved my drug-fuelled self by smoking a lot to cancel out my appetite and cover over the rumbling stomach with nicotine/THC satiation. Interestingly, after the Lord asked me to take the medication I am currently on for psychosis (a result of my drug addictions), an unavoidable side effect of this medicine is weight gain. I haven’t smoked anything now for well over 10 years, and now there is nothing to subdue my voracious appetite anymore, I thus have become the very image that I always feared, even down to the mild obesity. Interestingly though, I honestly no longer care about any of that now, unless I stare too long at myself in a mirror… so I am forced to shy away. Perhaps that’s part of my love -hate relationship with them. 
As embarrassing as it is to say so, and with deep awareness of how anti-cultural and even vulgar such a private admission is, it’s also worth nothing that although I had plenty of sexual experience with many different women before knowing Christ personally, He showed me since that He had also created me with a humiliatingly small sexual organ for a good reason. 
I have often wondered what it will be like for me if the Lord sees fit to have me crucified naked, like He was. Apart from the pain and suffering of the torture of the actual execution, there would be this hidden secret of mine (and I guess the girls who have seen it before, the price of my driving lustful tendency at the time) exposed for all to ridicule and humiliate, without me being able to do anything about it except take the blows and be ‘that guy’ that people laugh at.

Mirrors are very intimate objects, because we see ourselves in them. If we really know our own hearts, we can see the ugliness of ourselves in them too, which is perhaps why so many have issues with the way they look. When I see heavy make-up on a girl, for example, I see the insecurity, the self loathing, the people-pleasing spirit; the hope of being attractive to others, by the allurement of disguising the natural look, with all it’s creases and spots. I relate to it, but in the same kind of way as a former addict does, for the Lord has personally stripped me bare and confronted me with what the real issue is, which is the problem with my heart and all it’s wicked secrets. Here is the depth I had always craved from His fellowship, yet actually seeing it raw like this causes me to be in abject horror, for I KNOW now for sure that there is NOTHING good in me (that isn’t of Christ). 
All of us dress our nakedness with metaphorical bandages and band aids, to try to be something we in reality are not… and this is fallen human nature at its rawest. It’s simply the fig leaves of Adam and Eve, feebly covering the brokenness and trying to hide the shame.

It’s time to be refreshingly honest in this corrupt world. As you continue to read my blogs, as I post occasionally like this of the secrets of my soul, you will perhaps effectively be looking into a spiritual mirror, and maybe finding something of your true self there; for we are not so different, you and I.