Dismantled Mirrors

This morning I woke to a shaft of light on my pillow. It’s not unusual, at this time of the year, to wake to sunshine peeking through the slit in our curtains. In fact, it’s one of the things I love about the summer. But it is unusual for the light to fall on my pillow. 

Still foggy from sleep, my eyes absently scanned the room trying to solve the mystery. The curtains were mostly closed, there was no light from the hallway…  Then I spotted it. We’ve been remodeling our bathroom and had taken down the large mirror that hung over the sink. It leans against the wall next to our bed, opposite the window, until the work is finished. 

I sat up in bed, letting the light spill onto my shoulders. I held up my hand, for some reason marveling at the golden light and the heat in such an unusual place. The light–just as bright and warm as the sun streaming in directly from the window– was displaced, reflected onto my hands. What an amazing thing. The image of light with all its qualities, yet nothing more than a reflection. 

It made me think of Paul’s metaphor, how for now we see God only through a glass darkly. We see in part, but someday we’ll see in full. And yet this light wasn’t dimmed by the glass. It was bright, as full in its intensity as the real beam of light. Not only that, but it shone into a space that had never been lit before. 

I thought about all the usual places for God’s light to shine: the church, family, community service. The light is beautiful and full. But what about the places that it doesn’t naturally reach? The places where we might not assume his light shines, where brokenness and darkness seem to prevail? The divorce courts and doctor’s offices and foster homes and jails? The strip clubs and high-end stores and in the middle of the arguments in our homes? Does the light reach those places? 

Of course I know that God’s love reaches to every place we could encounter. But as the light reflected its warmth onto my skin, I wondered if he has made a similar plan for sharing his love. Maybe sometimes–perhaps most times– it pours indirectly through our own lives. 

The plan seems crazy enough in itself. But then, of course, there’s the issue of the surface that reflects the light. Sunlight can be reflected off of a mirror that is hung securely on the wall, perfectly centered and clean. But it can be reflected just as well, as my displaced bathroom mirror proves, from a mirror that is dismantled, a little dirty, and out of place. 

Could it be that God uses us to cast the light of his love into the corners of the world that have been in darkness? And not because we are perfect, but precisely because we reflect from our own broken, dismantled position? Could it be that our imperfections don’t stand in the way of his love, but are actually used to spread it farther?

If it’s true that God chooses us to shine his love, it begs the question: what imperfect place in our lives could he use to cast his light? What broken part, what dismantled dream, what detour to a place we never imagined might position us best to reflect his love into a new space? In that kind of economy of reflection, no broken place would be wasted. Can you imagine?

I hope we learn to look for the places where our dismantling creates new angles to reflect his love. I hope we stand back and let him redeem our brokenness to do what could only be done from the broken places. I hope we reflect the light of his love as fully as the mirror that cast the sunlight on me this morning. May the fullness of his love shine through our imperfect, but reflective, lives.