The Stranger in the Mirror

Joyce Urch and her husband, Eric, celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in a way neither of them could have imagined.

Twenty-six years earlier, Joyce had lost her sight to a hereditary disease. During those years, she came to know her five children, twelve grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren by the sound of their voices and the touch of their hands.

Then everything changed.

After being rushed to the hospital with severe chest pain, Joyce suffered a major heart attack and began experiencing kidney failure. Doctors weren’t sure she would survive, but emergency surgery saved her life.

It also gave her something no one expected.

When Joyce woke up, she could see.

“I can see! I can see!” she kept telling her husband.

At first, he thought she must be confused. So he asked her what color sweater he was wearing.

She leaned forward, looked closely, and smiled.

“Haven’t you gotten old.”

Without missing a beat, he laughed and replied, “Wait until you have a look in the mirror.”

I can’t imagine what that moment must have been like.

After more than two decades of blindness, Joyce wasn’t just seeing the world again. She was meeting the stranger in the mirror.

I wonder if many of us experience something similar spiritually.

Most of us spend years looking at ourselves through the lens of failure, regret, insecurity, or the hurtful words of others. Eventually, that’s the person we expect to see staring back at us.

But God sees something entirely different.

Through Jesus, He doesn’t define us by our worst moments. He calls us forgiven. Redeemed. Loved. His own.

And then, day by day, He continues the beautiful work of making us more like His Son.

Paul wrote:

“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Perhaps the greatest surprise isn’t what we see when we look in the mirror.

Perhaps it’s discovering what God has seen in us all along.

Yours in faith,

Roy Ice