The Mirror Over the Sink

Three people said it to Abiola in the same afternoon, and none of them had spoken to each other.

It was her mother's seventieth, in the function room at the back of a pub, with the beige carpet and the roller blind that would not go all the way up. Ninety people, a buffet, a nephew in charge of the music who took it far too seriously.

Her cousin said it first, by the drinks table, and said it lightly. You look like you've put something down.

Then her aunt, holding both her hands the way she does, said her shoulders had come down, and that a person's shoulders tell you everything.

Then her brother, who does not say things, squeezed her arm on his way past with two plates and said it was good to have her back.

Abiola smiled at all three of them and meant the smile. And then somewhere between the toast and the cake she took her coat off the back of a chair, went out through the double doors and down the corridor to the ladies', and stood at the sink with the tap running for longer than she needed to.

There was a mirror over that sink. Bad lighting, beige tiles, a roller towel that had jammed.

She looked at herself properly. Not a glance. She stood there and looked, the way you look for something you have lost in a drawer.

And there was nothing.

Not despair. That is the part she cannot explain to anybody. There was no misery in the glass either. It was simply her own face, the same face, and behind it the same interior she has been living in for a year and a half, and nothing in it that she could point at and say, there, that is what my cousin saw.

What she can find, when she goes looking, is quiet.

She used to run hot all the time. Braced from about six in the morning, working out the day, reading the week ahead, holding the shape of a thing that needed holding. Now she does not do that, and the space where it used to be is not full of anything. It is just quiet.

And she has come to a conclusion about that quiet, standing at that sink, and she has never said it out loud.

Quiet is only the noise stopping. It is not a thing arriving. Everyone can see something and she cannot find it, which means either they are being kind, or it never took in her.

She dried her hands on the jammed roller towel, went back down the corridor, and cut the cake.

The quiet is real. The glass is the wrong instrument

Start with the honest half, because it is honest and it deserves saying.

Quiet is not the same as free. The absence of a pressure is not automatically the presence of a life. A woman can stop running hot and simply be flat, and plenty of people would tell her that flatness is peace, and she would know they were wrong. You haven't been fooling yourself. You've been reading yourself accurately, which is more than most people manage.

The trouble is not your reading. The trouble is the instrument.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.2 Corinthians 3:18

Read what is actually in Paul's mirror, because it is not the reader.

Beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord. The face in that glass is His. Paul is not describing a woman studying herself for evidence of improvement. He is describing a woman looking at Christ, and the changing happening to her while her attention is somewhere else entirely. You are being transformed at this minute, and 2 Corinthians 3:18 is a sentence that never once asks the transformed person to verify it, because the last four words of it hand the whole work to the Lord, the Spirit.

Neither of the two witnesses in this case

Now look at the two courts you've been running the case in, because there are only two of them and neither one is competent.

The first is your own interior. You went to a mirror over a sink and asked yourself what you could feel, and the answer came back nothing, and you wrote it down as a finding. Somebody taught you, somewhere, that when God does something in a person the person is the first to know. Scripture does not say that anywhere. What is written in 2 Corinthians 3:18 is that the transforming is from the Lord, the Spirit, so you have no instrument in there for measuring it, and that is not a fault in you and never was.

The second court is your family, and this one is warmer and just as wrong. Three people love you and three people saw something, and if you make them the proof you've simply moved the whole weight of your standing onto whoever happens to speak to you next month. You are not standing on your cousin's eyesight. Nothing in 2 Corinthians 3 puts the evidence in another person's eyes, and the Spirit does not route His own work back to you through a kind remark at a drinks table.

So here is the ground. 2 Corinthians 3:17 says that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Not where the feeling of freedom is. Where He is. And He is in you, so you have that freedom already, settled without a single vote from a function room, a family, or a mirror with bad lighting over it.

I have no standing to tell a woman what has changed inside her. I have not lived in there. Philippians 1:6 has standing: He who began a good work in you is the one completing it, and His Spirit is the one making that sentence land in a corridor outside a ladies' toilet. You have a good work going on in you that you did not start and are not being asked to audit.