I thought of this analogy in the middle of the night when I was up feeding Mary Faith.

     Imagine that I have a small hand mirror, the size that would fit in my purse.  Not only is it small, but it's not a very good mirror.  The glass isn't smooth and the paint is chipping off the back.  It has a few small cracks in it.  The resulting reflection is wavy, cloudy, and distorted.  Now suppose I use this mirror and catch a reflection of a part of a person's hand.  I study the reflection very carefully and then decide that I know that person completely because I have invested so much in the study of that reflection. 

     Silly, right?  There's so much more to a person than what can be captured by a small and flawed mirror.  Yet, how often do we do that to God?  We try to make Him fit in a box that's comfortable for us, or reduce His workings to some manageable equation that we can understand.  We stare and stare into our little mirrors trying to see who God is, but He's so much bigger than any of that!  He defies definition. 

     Sometimes I think God is quite intentional about debunking our theories and formulas about how He must operate.  ( I think He created the platypus just to mess with our taxonomy!)  Just when I think I have Him "figured out" in some area, He does something that doesn't fit my paradigm of who He is.  I long to understand Him, yet I know that any so-called "god" that is small enough for me to understand is not worthy of my worship.

     I'm not going to throw out my "mirror" or stop looking into it, trying to catch a glimpse of God's hand, but I must remember that I only see a tiny part.  He alone sees the big picture.  In the end, I must trust only Him and not my small ideas of how I think He should work.

Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. (1 Corinthians 13:12, NLT)