Faces That Are Not Ashamed

She prays looking at her own knees.

Not deliberately. She has never made a decision about it. But if you filmed her, which nobody has and nobody should, you would see a sixteen-year-old on the edge of a bed with her chin tucked down and her eyes fixed on the carpet or her hands or the pattern on her duvet, and you would think, without knowing anything about her, that she was in some kind of trouble.

She is not in trouble. Her life is fine. Two parents who are still together, a small group of friends, a predicted grade she is quietly proud of.

The problem is what she thinks is at the other end.

She has a form tutor. He is not a bad man. He is not cruel and he has never shouted at her. He does a thing with his face when she hands work in, a very small thing, a tightening around the eyes and a slight breath out through the nose, and it means: this is not what it should be, and we both know it, and I am not going to embarrass you by saying so.

She has been getting that look for two years.

And when she closes her eyes to pray, that is the face she sees. Not a face of anger. That would almost be easier. A face of patient, mild, permanent disappointment.

So she keeps her chin down, because it is easier to talk to somebody when you are not looking at them doing that.

There is a verse about faces and it goes the other way

They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed (Psalm 34:5).

Read what happens to the person in that verse.

They look up. And the result of looking is not that they get told off. The result is that they are lightened, which in the older word means lit up, illuminated, as though light came off the face they looked at and landed on theirs.

And then the second half: their faces were not ashamed. Which is another way of saying that the thing they were braced for did not happen.

That verse was written by somebody who knew exactly what you do with your chin, and it was put in the book for people like you.

You are looked at by a face that lights people up rather than tightening at them. That is what the word says happens when a person looks, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that real to a sixteen-year-old on the edge of a bed, because Scripture calls Him the Spirit of adoption and not the spirit of assessment.

What you have done, and it is not a sin

Let me name what has happened, because you have not done anything wrong and I want you to hear that from somebody before anything else.

You have taken a real face from your real life and put it on God.

Everybody does this. Every single person does it, and most of them never notice, and most of them are doing it with a parent or a teacher or somebody from when they were nine. Your mind needed a picture of what God's face does when it looks at you, and it reached for the nearest available example of a person in authority who was disappointed but polite about it, and it found your form tutor, and it has been running that image for two years.

That is not rebellion. It is a mind doing its job with the material it had.

You are not being assessed and you have never once been marked. Scripture says God is not looking at you the way people look, because the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who replaces a wrong picture with a true one, slowly, and He does it without making you feel stupid for having had the wrong one.

What shining actually means

The blessing that this whole site is about has a line in the middle of it: the LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee.

A shining face, in the way that phrase is used, is not a bright light. It is the thing a face does when it sees somebody it is pleased to see. You have seen it. It is what a grandparent's face does at a station. It is what a dog does with its whole body but a human being does mostly with the eyes and the mouth in about half a second.

That is the specific thing God's face is described as doing toward a person. Not tolerating. Not being patient. Shining, which is the involuntary reaction of somebody who is glad you walked in.

You have a face turned toward you that lights up when it sees you. The word says make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you, and the two are joined because the shining is what grace looks like when it is on a face, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that felt rather than merely understood.

And I am not going to oversell it. Looking up once does not delete two years of a picture, and you may close your eyes tomorrow and see the tutor again. That is not failure. What is settled is whose face is actually at the other end, and a girl who knows that prays differently even while the old picture is still fading.