[This is one in a series of devotional reflections prepared for Horley Baptist Church during January 2024]
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”
In the pre-Disney version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Snow White is the step-daughter of a queen who has a magic mirror, to which she addresses the question above. The mirror assures her that she, the queen, is the most beautiful person in the land. However, as Snow White matures, the mirror starts to answer differently. This drives the queen into a rage of jealousy.
How do we react when someone else gets the recognition that we think we deserve? Can we accept that times change, that there comes a time when we must all hand over to someone else? In this week’s ‘Yours’[1] Dennis described some of his feelings about being overlooked; no doubt many of us can identify with at least some of what he has written.
I was reminded of an illustration although I cannot recall its origin. A person looks into a mirror and sees a dirty mark on her face. She licks her finger and rubs the mirror, but the image only appears smudged. She wipes the mirror with a dry tissue but the mark is still there; she gets some glass clearer and polishes the mirror but the mark still shows. Finally she discards the mirror altogether, choosing to ignore what others can still see.
The point of the illustration was ask whether we behave in a similar way to the Word of God. If we do not like what we see, how do we react? We may be tempted to put the passage into a different context, look around for another version more to our liking or simply ignore the passage altogether.
Returning to Snow White, the queen ordered that her step-daughter should be taken into a local forest and killed. To cut a long story short, that did not happen. The Seven Dwarfs in the story protected Snow White and cared for her until she was able to return to society, thus showing that little people can achieve a lot when working together.
In its classical form, the story of Snow White dates from a collection of German folk tales compiled by the Grimm brothers in the early years of the 19th century. A somewhat older German hymn gives us the true answer to the queen’s question:
Fair are the meadows, fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the blooming garb of spring;
Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer,
Who makes the woeful heart to sing!
Charles Fry was an English building contractor who is credited with the forming the original Salvation Army band. In 1881 he wrote the lines of his final hymn:
I’ve found a friend in Jesus, He’s everything to me,
He’s the fairest of ten thousand to my soul;
Approximately 160 years ago, the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon published a collection of reflections which are still popular today. In the passage for the evening of 10th June[2] he wrote:
“… we should consider the Word to be as a mirror into which Christ looks down from heaven; and then we, looking into it, see his face reflected as in a glass”
Have you gazed into that mirror today?
References:
[1] Dennis Ginter, HBC Yours, 04/Feb/2024
[2] Charles Spurgeon, ‘Morning and Evening’, p. 207
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Contributed by Steve Humphreys; © Steve Humphreys