It's Not About Me by Max Lucado

Author:Max Lucado
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-09-30T10:54:54+00:00

Part Two: God-Promoting

8. God’s Mirrors

G. R. Tweed looked across the Pacific waters at the American ship on the horizon.

Brushing the jungle sweat from his eyes, the young naval officer swallowed deeply and made his decision. This could only be his only chance for escape.

Tweed had been hiding on Guam for nearly three years. When the Japanese occupied the island in 1941, he ducked into the thick tropical brush. Survival hadn’t been easy, but he preferred the swamp to a POW camp.

Late in the day July 10, 1944, he spotted the friendly vessel. He scurried up a hill and positioned himself on a cliff. Reaching into his pack, he pulled out a small mirror. At 6:20 P.M., he began sending signals. Holding the edge of the mirror in his direction of the boat. Three short flashes. Three long. Three short again. Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash.

Dot-dot-dot. SOS.

The signal caught the eye of a sailor on board the USS McCall. A rescue party boarded a motorized dinghy and slipped into the cove past the coastal guns. Tweed was rescued.1

He was glad to have that mirror, glad he knew how to use it, and glad that the mirror cooperated. Suppose it hadn’t. (Prepare yourself for a crazy thought.) Suppose the mirror had resisted, pushed its own agenda. Rather than reflect a message from the sun, suppose it had opted to send its own. After all, three years of isolation would leave one starved for attention. Rather than sending an SOS, the mirror could have sent an LAM. “Look at me.”

An egotistical mirror?

The only crazier thought would be an insecure mirror. What if I blow it? What if I send a dash when I’m supposed to send a dot? Besides, have you seen the blemishes on my surface? Self-doubt could paralyze a mirror.

So could self-pity. Been crammed down in that pack, lugged through jungles, and now, all of a sudden expected to face the bright sun and perform a crucial service. No way.

Staying in the pack. Not getting any reflection out of me.

Good thing Tweed’s mirror didn’t have a mind of its own.

But God’s mirrors? Unfortunately we do.

We are his mirrors, you know. Tools of heaven’s heliography. Reduce the human job description to one phrase, and this is it: Reflect God’s glory. As Paul wrote: “And we, with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness of our Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18 JB).

Some reader just arched an eyebrow. Wait a second, you are thinking. I’ve read that passage before, more than once. And it sounded different. Indeed it may have. Perhaps it’s because you are used to reading it in a different translation. “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (emphasis mine).

One translation says, “beholding as in a mirror;” another says, “reflecting like mirrors.

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