Something New In The Mirror Every Year

You found a photograph and you did the thing.

You did not plan to. You were looking for something else in a drawer, and there it was, and you picked it up. And within about two seconds you had stopped looking at the photograph and started running a comparison, and the comparison was not kind, and you put it back face down.

I have watched people do this for a long time. It happens in about the same amount of time it takes to read a road sign, and almost nobody notices they are doing it.

Here is what I want to say about it, and I am going to be blunt, because I am the wrong man to be gentle about this and I would only be pretending.

I am fifty eight years old.

I have a face with a great deal of weather in it. There are lines around my eyes that arrived in my thirties from squinting into sun on roads, and there is more silver in this beard than there is anything else, and I am not going to stand here and tell you that any of that is a tragedy, because it is not, and you would know immediately that I was performing.

But I am also not going to hand you the other thing, the bright cheerful one about how age is beautiful, because that is a different kind of lie and it is the one you have already refused.

What I want to do is much smaller. I want to look at the arithmetic you are doing, because I think the arithmetic is wrong.

You are treating your face as an account that is being drawn down. Every year, a withdrawal. Something goes, and nothing comes, and the balance is lower than last year and will be lower again.

That is a subtraction, and it is being run on you every single morning, and the reason it hurts is that a subtraction has no other side.

A crown of glory

There is a line in Proverbs about an old head, and people quote it badly, and read properly it is doing something quite specific.

The hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness. (Proverbs 16:31, King James Version)

The hoary head is a crown of glory.

Hoary means white with age. And the word chosen for it is crown, which is worth stopping on, because a crown is not a consolation prize and it is not something handed over to soften a loss. A crown is what you put on somebody at the end of a thing they came through.

But look at the second half, because that is where the sentence gets honest.

If it be found in the way of righteousness. The crown is not attached to the white hair by itself. It is attached to the road the white hair got there on. What is being honored in that verse is a life, and the visible age is the evidence that the life was lived.

Which is precisely the thing your arithmetic cannot see.

Your subtraction reads only one column. It counts what has gone from the face and never once counts what arrived in the person, and so it reports a loss every year, and it has been reporting a loss for a decade, and it will keep on doing that until you die, because a subtraction can only ever go one way.

The years on this face are the evidence of a road, and they have never once been a withdrawal from an account. Proverbs 16:31 attaches the crown to the way a life was walked rather than to a look, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person read the other column.

What arrived while you were watching what left

Let me be concrete, because vague comfort is worthless here.

Go and find the woman in the photograph. The one you put face down.

She had better skin than you. I will grant that immediately and I am not going to argue it, because arguing it is what everybody does and it never works.

Now tell me what she could not do.

She could not tell when somebody was lying to her. She learned that later, at some cost, and she has it now. She did not know which of her friends would still be there in fifteen years, and she wasted a great deal of worry on people who were not going to matter. She could not sit with a person in real trouble without needing to fix it. She had no idea what she would do if the worst thing happened, and you do, because it did, and you are still here.

That is not a consolation. That is a genuine inventory of things gained, and every one of them cost you something, and the cost is written on your face.

You have been reading the receipt as the loss.

What is written on this face is the record of what was paid for, and it has never once been the damage. The written word puts the crown on the head that came down a road rather than on the one that stayed young, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person the column they have not been reading.

Ten years, and one thing gained

So here is the assignment.

Find a photograph of yourself from ten years ago, and name one thing you have gained since.

Get the actual photograph. Do not do this from memory, because from memory you will picture yourself better looking than you were and the exercise will not bite.

Look at her. Let the comparison run, because it is going to run whether you permit it or not, and pretending otherwise wastes the first thirty seconds.

Then, out loud, name one thing you have that she did not have.

Not a possession. Something in you. One capacity, one piece of knowledge, one thing you can now do with a person or a crisis or your own mind that she could not have done.

Say it out loud with the photograph in your hand, so that the two things are in the room together for once, instead of the loss column standing there on its own.

Then put the photograph somewhere you can see it, rather than face down in the drawer.

You are able to hold that photograph and count the other column, and the comparison has never once been the only thing available in the room. Proverbs 16:31 calls the white head a crown rather than a subtraction, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman holding a picture of herself at thirty five.