I looked in the mirror and sighed.
Oh.
I didn't look like a model.
I didn't look like a glamorous more put-together version of Jane. I just looked like me: a middle-aged woman who has to color her hair to keep the gray at bay (which she just hasn't learned to accept yet) and who has thinning eyebrows and a few facial lines with a new pair of glasses that aren't much different than her old ones except for the color.
What was I thinking?
Okay, okay, I'll post a picture and don't bother giving compliments please. I don't look horrible. I look fine but I am what I am. Just like you are what you are.
Why do we ever try to be someone or something we aren't?
Why do we ever take ourselves too seriously?
Think back ten years. What advertisements caught your attention? Which ones catch your eye now?
People are funny really. As we age we start to fall apart no matter how much work we put into ourselves. And if we try to be something we aren't (like a 20 year old version of ourselves) we are going to be frustrated. Or we can just be who we are and laugh at ourselves enjoy where God's got us.
Jesus says in John 16:12, "I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now."
He's talking to His disciples about some serious stuff, but He could be talking to us about how our bodies are going to respond to life in the years to come. That is His mercy! Would you have wanted to know how your body was going to get saggy and soft? How that one part of your face was going to look pretty horrid when you first woke up in the morning? Would you have wanted to know how those thick eyebrows you had that you didn't realize were pretty nifty would slowly disappear? And would you want to know that after childbirth laughing can become a small wardrobe emergency?
I don't think we would have wanted to know.
Have you ever seen the version of Freaky Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis (I love her)? I love her lines when she first looks into the mirror when she and her daughter played by Lindsey Lohan switch places. She says (she is the teenager in her body now), "Oh I am so Old! I look like a Crypt Keeper!"
That makes me laugh! Think about it -- if you had been transported into your middle-aged body and looked into the mirror you might have screamed the same thing! Oh, my...sorry for the tangent. I need to wake my youngest son up for his morning routine before school.
Have a laugh today about yourself. It is the best kind really (and FYI -- this is not the same thing as putting yourself down...DON'T DO THAT!)