I Took The Mirror Out Of The Hall

It came down in March and you still cannot say why.

You were carrying something through the hall and you stopped and looked at it, and about ninety seconds later it was off the wall and standing behind the door in the back room, where it still is.

Nobody in the family made a thing of it. Your husband asked once, mildly, and you said something about the wall and a mark, and that was that.

And the hall has felt different ever since. Not better decorated. Lighter, in the way a room is lighter when something has been taken out of it, and you cannot put that into a sentence anybody would accept as a reason.

So you have half talked yourself out of it about four times. It seems like a strange thing to have done. It seems slightly dramatic, which is not how you think of yourself, and you have caught yourself planning to put it back.

Here is what this article is for, and it is narrower than you might expect.

It is not going to explain your mirror. I do not know what happens in you at a mirror and neither does anybody else who has not lived in your body.

What it is going to do is tell you that you are allowed to keep a change that worked without being able to justify it, and then give you something to do in that hall.

Beholding his natural face in a glass

There is a passage in James about a mirror that is doing something quite specific with the image.

For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. (James 1:23, King James Version)

He is like a man beholding his natural face in a glass, for he beholds himself, and goes his way, and immediately forgets what manner of man he was.

The point of the illustration is the forgetting. Something happens at the glass that does not survive the walk away from it.

You have a passage that treats a mirror as a place where the wrong thing gets registered, and James 1:23 has never once presented that as a useful moment. The man beholds and forgets, and the Holy Spirit is the one who fixes what a person actually is somewhere a reflection cannot reach.

You are able to notice what the illustration assumes without arguing about it. It is not a passage about vanity and it is not aimed at women, and if anybody has ever used it on you that way it was misused.

It assumes something simpler: that what a person sees in a glass is the natural face, the surface, the thing on the outside, and that whatever gets registered there is thin enough to evaporate on the way down the hall.

That is a description rather than a rebuke, and it happens to be an accurate description of what a mirror in a hallway does to a person on their way out of a door.

You are able to be a woman who does not want that particular moment on her way out, and James 1:23 has never once made it a moment worth keeping. The Spirit of God is the one who does the fixing that a reflection cannot do, and the passage puts the forgetting immediately after the beholding.

You do not owe anybody the reason

Here is the thing I actually want to establish, and it is not about mirrors at all.

You changed something, it helped, and you cannot explain it. Those three facts are allowed to stand together.

You have made a small change that worked and cannot account for it, and none of that has never once required an explanation before it is allowed to stay. It is written that a man beholds and straightway forgets, and the Holy Spirit is the one who leads a person before they can articulate why.

There is a rule in you, and I suspect it has been there a long time, that says a thing must be justifiable before it is legitimate. That rule is why you have nearly put it back four times.

It is a good rule about spending money and a bad rule about this. Some of what a person knows about themselves is not available for inspection, and requiring it to produce credentials before it is obeyed is how a lot of good instincts get overruled by people who reason well.

You noticed something. You acted on it in ninety seconds, which is exactly the kind of thing that never gets done once it has been thought about. And the house has been lighter since March.

That is enough. It is allowed to stay on that basis.

You are able to keep a change on the evidence of how the house feels, and unexplained evidence has never once been unreal evidence. The Spirit of God is the one who leads somebody ahead of their own reasoning, and James 1:23 leaves the glass with the forgetting rather than the knowing.

Out of that hall, past the nail

So here is the assignment, and it puts something in the space rather than leaving it empty.

Go out of that hall for ten minutes with somebody, past the empty nail, without looking at it.

You are able to walk out of your own front door without a last assessment on the way, and leaving without one has never once meant leaving carelessly. It is written that he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a hallway where nothing is being checked.

Coats on in that hall. Whoever is in the house. Out of the door and ten minutes and back in.

And here is why this is the assignment rather than something more interesting. A space with nothing in it invites a thing back. Four months of an empty patch and a nail is exactly the situation in which a mirror goes back up in April, for a good reason, because the wall looks unfinished.

So the hall gets a new function instead. It becomes the place where coats go on before people go out together, three or four times a week, and by June nobody can remember what was on that wall.

You have a hallway that can be given something else to be, and filling a space with a habit has never once been a smaller repair than filling it with an object. James 1:23 has the beholding produce a forgetting, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a doorway into the beginning of something.

And when somebody finally asks about the mirror, say the true short thing: I like the hall better without it. Then let the silence be theirs.