I’ve always been the girl who needs a mirror to put on her lip-gloss. I tweak car mirrors to my advantage, borrow the backs of napkin containers at a restaurant and even use the rear-facing camera in my phone.

And today, I used the reflection of myself in the computer screen.

I’d been typing the beginning of a different blog post and the Times New Romans bluntly faced back at me. Black on white. Contrast on blank space. Words in the open.

For most purposes, what I could see was a barely-filled Word document. But then I looked a bit closer.

I almost didn’t recognize that I could actually see myself in the screen’s surface until I needed it and I began to search for it.

And there I was with white headphones streaming from my ears. I was looking back at myself with the beginning of a blog post as the layered backdrop.

There I am.

There I am.

It’s a little bit like when those 3D posters filled every spare spot in the mall stores back in the early nineties. We stood in droves in front of them, tried so desperately to somehow shift our focus, and then pray that the 3D image would appear as perfectly as it did for my uncle and my cousin every time.

It was an eager search for a different reality in the same picture.

Sometimes I feel I live most of my life like a subdued Helen Keller, deaf and blind to what is really going on. I see what is stark and pointed and painful, even, but to see myself well or to see others well is a struggle. I don’t see until I intentionally shift my focus to see what should be seen.

I react to discomfort and hurt and I fill immediate needs with the things that will fix. I look closely at the big things that wound and the big words that steal, but it takes a calculated swing of concentration to see what is true and what is real. It takes that purposeful searching to see myself.

January is a big month for changes. We want to lose weight or stick to a household budget. Maybe we want to overhaul our personal discipline for reading the Bible or exercising. Maybe we just want our lives to be different.

But different doesn’t happen until different eyes are opened. Different doesn’t happen until we see ourselves.

We have to open our eyes to what is in order to know what we need to do to change. And sometimes that is the hardest thing to do. To see ourselves for who we truly are is scary and to see our real reflections takes a courage that maybe we don’t have.

But it’s worth it.

Do we have the courage today to open our eyes?

by Sarah Markley, who is slowly peeking at her own reflection today

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