3 Reasons to Stop Looking in Your Mirror: Seeing yourself through the eyes of others

Next time you feel the need to look in a mirror, consider using someone else’s.

No I don’t mean this literally. It’s a metaphor.

You see, we can be overly critical of ourselves and only see the flaws. And then we’re always surprised when someone pays us a compliment.

This has happened to me a lot recently. God has been teaching me, through others, how He sees me.

My realisation

When I left my job last July, I spent some time studying the spiritual gifts and trying to learn what mine were. I did some quizzes and self-assessments and found them a little inclusive so I asked some close Christian friends for their thoughts.

What they said surprised me.

The top ranking spiritual gift of the results I compiled from my friends’ answers was encouragement.

If you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality tests, then you will know what I mean when I say that I am an ESTJ type. If you are not, then you should know that this is a personality type that isn’t afraid to speak its mind.

I have always found that I can be very blunt and critical; the exact opposite of encouraging. Yet, for some reason, my friends believed that I was gifted in encouragement.

I realised that this happened often.

One moment I would be thinking about how my conversations seem to always turn into lectures with me doing all the talking (I must have been born with a bit of teacher in me). Soon after I would find a friend telling me how they loved to confide in me and how I was a good listener.

Even just today, I received a surprise. To complete Jeff Goins’s Intentional Blogging challenge for today, I had to ask five friends to describe me and/or my writing style in at least three adjectives or phrases.

I emailed a good friend and former work colleague and she replied with this:

I was blown away. Determined, maybe. But I had never thought of myself as courageous!

These people viewed me differently to how I viewed myself. They could see the good in me, the fruit with which God was blessing me.

I knew from the Bible that God also saw me differently, as righteous even. Isaiah 61:10 says:

“For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of his righteousness, as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”

I also knew from my own experience that God could make me see others how He saw them. It suddenly occurred to me that these kind words said by my friends were a snippet of God’s thoughts about me.

It was an incredible lesson to learn and has changed me for the better.

So what can you take away from this?

3 reasons to stop looking in your mirror

• There is probably no one in the world who thinks less of you than you. There is value in searching your own heart for the sins that lie hidden there. However, Satan often finds a foothold here, causing you to focus only on your imperfections. He begins to fill your head with lies, making you believe that God must think less of you because you are flawed. Don’t allow him the pleasure.
• Others see what you can’t see. Sometimes I wonder what I look like to the people walking past me. There are certain parts of yourself (your face especially) that you can’t see with your own two eyes alone. This is true of your character as well. You will never be able to experience how it feels to be around you. You can listen to how others describe it though.
• God reveals His thoughts about you through others. Have you ever experienced compassion for someone that you know you could not have mustered on your own? That’s because God can open your eyes to see through His. This means that He can open others’ eyes to see you like He sees you too.

So next time someone pays you a compliment, pay attention. Take note of the truths that God is revealing to you.

Don’t forget to tell us how it’s going. What has God been teaching you about how He sees you? Leave a comment below.