There is a full length mirror that hangs on the back of the bathroom door in one of my churches, and I just happened to catch a glimpse of myself as I was drying my hands a moment ago. 

I tilted my head and squinted a bit, trying to wrap my mind around who it was looking back at me.

She looked like somewhat of an impostor, that person in the mirror...someone standing in for the "real me" in the sense that she looked so young, so small.

Her eyes were big and wide like she was ready for whatever life wanted to throw her way, but an almost scared glint flashed across them as if she was simultaneously not sure of what was to come nor whether she could handle it when it did.

"It looks as though she's been playing dress-up with the contents of her mother's jewelry box," I observed while eyeing first the bright and bulky necklace around her neck and then the matching earrings dangling from her ears. The prominent watch face on her wrist looked much too big for her evident smallness.

My eyes moved downward toward her protruding belly as I began to realize why I assumed her the aforementioned impostor...a phony...a fraud.

It was, in fact, a little girl inside a woman's body looking back at me in my reflection...taken aback by her current reality.

Wasn't I so recently the little girl I now see before me? 

Wasn't it just yesterday I was pilfering thru my mother's things, trying to be older, prettier, and more sophisticated like her?

Who, then, is this? With these wide and uncertain eyes who carries within her another life soon to be born?

"Surely, it can't be me, " I think to myself as I wring the paper towel in my slightly swollen hands.

"Ah, but it is," the wiser part of me replies. "Take courage. Have faith. Rejoice! For very soon you will be a vessel of new life."

As I took one final glance at the mirror, I felt a wisp of a smile ease across my face.

I tossed my paper towel into the waste basket and got back to work.