This Song Is About You (And Me)

You’re so vain

I bet you think this song is about you. 

Don’t you? Don’t you?  ~ Carly Simon

My family made fun of me when I hung this mirror in my coop. Yes, shame on them, they did. I tried to convince my scoffers that chickens really do love to look at themselves. Even roosters! Like handsome Basil here. He stares and stares. It’s quite funny. Perhaps a tad weird.

But it’s good for us to take a long, hard look at ourselves every now and again. Actually, every day. Funny enough, as flawed humans we tend to not see very clearly our own flaws. The lens blurs a bit when we look at our own stuff. It is just so much easier (and possibly more fun) to see the issues of others.

“Why do you look at the speck of DUST in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the LOG in your own?” Matthew 7:3

Speck versus log. You get the idea. 

Why is it so easy to see the mistakes and missteps of our brothers—and sisters and parents and children and friends and neighbors—and, yet, quickly gloss over our own? I am so guilty of this.

We can effortlessly justify and minimize and explain away our own choices all day every day, but then, oh that speck of dust in someone else’s eye, man, that gets us! That gets under our skin. That gets us all hot and bothered. That gets us up on our high horse. How dare they?

Honestly, I think this is one of the devil’s favorite tactics. He loves to distract us from
working on ourselves. If he gets us focused on someone else’s mess, he knows we won’t have much time to address that pretty messy person in the mirror.  

He doesn’t want us to focus on fixing ourselves. He wants us to keep minimizing and justifying and explaining so we go on living complacent and comfortable in our own stench. Our sin. He does this to keep us from God’s goodness and His best for us.

But God has more for us. Better for us. His best. 

“I ask that the eyes of your (my) heart may be enlightened, so that you may know the hope of His calling, the riches of His glorious inheritance …” ~ Ephesians 1:18

Another version says,

“I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so you can understand the confident hope He has given.” 

Eyes flooded with light! I love that. 

Of course the evil one wants to keep us in the dark. To keep us afraid. To keep us from looking at ourselves. To keep us from Truth. The very last thing he wants us to know is that beautiful confident hope and the riches of our glorious inheritance we have in Jesus. 

Sometimes, we just don’t want to see. Or hear. Or feel. Or "go there." We choose, instead, to numb and dull and deflect. We harden our hearts and we hide in our dark.

Matthew 13:15 might make it most clear —

“For this people’s heart has become calloused; 

they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. 

Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, 

understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’”

Don’t be afraid of that mirror. Don’t be a chicken. Or maybe, DO be a chicken — like Basil. Take a good look. Take an honest look. 

Ask Jesus to flood your eyes with His light.  

That is where truth and beauty become clear. 

That is where hope and healing become ours.