Faces

Save face! Go wash your face! Face the facts! I know your face. We get lied to our faces and can have someone laugh in our face. We can put on a happy face but be faced with a dilemma. We sometimes don’t want to face the truth but we have to face reality at some point. What dangers do we face?

We see faces on magazine covers, billboards, in crowds and even the mirror. The faces of the youth, babies, middle-aged and elderly all have a story to tell. We have laughing faces and thoughtful, pensive faces. Faces of the unknown pass us on the street and we recognize certain faces in the media - our celebrities and heros but who are they really? George Bernard Shaw said that “you use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”

There is a Japanese myth that says we all have three faces. The first one is shown to the world and we let them see what we want them to see. The second face is the one we show to our family, our close friends and those we trust. But the last or third face is the one we keep to ourselves and show no one. That is the reflection of who we truly are.

It’s interesting that God created symmetry in faces of all creatures on earth. The eyes are positioned above to view the world. The nose is down to not only drain the sinus from tears, but pick up scents. The mouth is to ingest food that the eyes have seen and the nose has smelled. There are even universalities of facial expressions. We read faces for social signals. Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize a person’s face but on the other hand, FFA or fusiform facial area in the right hemisphere of our brains increases blood flow to that area when our brain recognizes a face!

James, the brother of Jesus, compares looking at our face in the mirror to listening to the Word of God and then going away forgetting what we saw. James 1: 22-25 tells us that we are to…not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.

Maybe it’s time to face the truth of what we are living today. Dark shadows seem to cover the world in so many ways. We can choose to live in a grey world or heed Helen Keller’s words. At 19 months, she became both blind and deaf and went on to become a writer and lecturer. “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.”