Seeing Yourself.

Today, I wanted to challenge myself.
I'm going to start by saying that it was not easy.
At all.
I challenged myself with not looking into a mirror, or my reflection in general, for a day.

You'd think that this would be easy because you don't have to look up.
False.
For anyone who has ever tried putting on make-up without a mirror has an idea...
That was kind of difficult, but alas, I did it!
Anywho, my reasoning:
I wanted to do this because I feel like I spend so much time looking at what I look like.
We never really think about it, but it's natural to look at yourself.
It's part of our daily routine.
Pushing myself to not look in the mirror was hard.
I had to remind myself every time I went somewhere to not look at my reflection.
So much of the time we scream, "Look! Notice me!" inside that we let it take over us.
I'm just as guilty as anyone.
And this....this kicked my butt.
Especially when my new glasses came in the mail...I couldn't look at myself in them.
I had to wait!

It made me think about myself; what I look like on the inside, what God was doing in my life, and how I was changing and what I needed to change.
It was a huge wake-up call, and a very rude one at that.
I spend so much time thinking about how I look to other people instead of looking at what I do for other people.
After going all day without looking into a mirror, I saw something a little different.
I felt like I saw someone else.
I did.
As strange as it sounds, I saw me.
I looked at my features and saw something good; something positive.
I didn't directly point out my flaws.
I could see my green eyes, my crazy, curly hair, my pearl teeth, and perfectly pink cheeks.
These are things I've always looked at, but never really saw.
I could always find something wrong with me.
After this, I told myself that I'm going to do my best to look at me.
Saying this to myself was obviously very hard.
I spend so much of the time that I look at myself, finding something about myself to hate.
Why?
So I can tell people how much I dislike a part of me and they can make me feel better.
Yeah, I'll admit to doing it every now and again.
I highly doubt you can deny doing the same.
We spend so much time putting ourselves down.
We pick out every single flaw we have and focus all of our attention on it.
All of our energy goes into disliking things about ourselves.
My all time favorite verse is Psalm 139:14;

“I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

How beautiful is that?
Going from that, in Isaiah 12: 5 it says;

“Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world.”

Let the world know of his grace and his glory.

The joy I've gotten from this has made me dance and sing.
I'm promising myself, right here, that I'm going to do my absolute best to change my attitudes about the way I look.
It's not going to be easy.
In fact, it's going to be extremely hard, but I can do it.
With my friends and family to support me and Christ walking with me, I have no doubt in my heart that I can do this.

So here I go.