Reflections on the poem by Peter Dale Wimbrow Sr.
I ran into the poem “The Guy in the Glass” by Peter Dale Wimbrow Sr. today and had to add it to my list of poems to memorize! One of my favorite couplets from the poem is this:
The feller whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the guy staring back from the glass.
Go read the whole poem here: Poem | Peter Ayers Wimbrow, III (This is the best first-hand source I could find for the poem).
The poem is about looking in the glass when you are successful and being confident that you can be proud of the person you see in the mirror.
We try to please a lot of people in our lives: our wives, our children, our parents, our friends, our co-workers, our bosses, and many others. Among all of these, we are almost always our harshest critics. We know our own weaknesses. We know how insufficient our work is. We know what we could have done more in a situation. We often wish that we could be more.
So, what is the trick to being content with, and even loving, the man who looks back at us from the mirror?
I think there are at least two parts.
The first is to recognize our true identity as children of God. This is a pretty radical thought! We really are children of a perfect, divine, transcendent being. And what’s more, He wants us to be like Him!
That thought can be incredibly enabling, or it can be paralyzing. Letting it be enabling takes faith, hope, and trust. It takes choosing to be faithful and believe that God sees more in us than our present weaknesses. It takes trusting that he loves us and walks with us through this process of becoming like Him is a process. And it takes hope that we can keep choosing to change even when we are very flawed and very human.
The second key, I think, is to give ourselves a lot of grace .
Because we are our own worst critics, we can choose to give ourselves grace. For me, this grace is also rooted deeply in my faith that God who loves me is also willing to forgive me. When I can turn my life over to Him, through Jesus Christ, every day, then I can be proud of the person that I am becoming. Even when there are bumps in the road in the past, I can choose to trust that I can keep re-pointing myself in the direction of heaven and a better, perfected version of myself.
Maybe that’s what it means for the guy in the glass to be your friend: not that you think he’s perfect, but that you can look him in the eye, know where he’s been, know where he still falls short, and still have hope in where he’s going.
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