The Face Through the Ceiling

The block is red, it is the same red block, and this is the ninth time he has brought it to her.

He is two and a bit, and he walks the way they walk at two, as if the floor might move, and he holds the block out with both hands like it is the crown jewels and he has been sent to deliver them. She takes it. She says thank you, the way she has said thank you to eleven years of children on this carpet. He turns round, goes and gets the same block from where she has just put it, and brings it back, and his face when he arrives is what she cannot stop looking at this morning. There is nothing in it. No reckoning. No "let us see if she has learned yet." He is simply glad, all the way through, that she is there and that he has something to give her.

Upstairs the service is finishing. She knows because the floor tells her: the shuffle of the last hymn, the scrape as everybody sits, and then the low even voice of the minister that comes through the ceiling every week at this point, muffled, so that she catches the shape of the words and not the words. The LORD bless you and keep you. A toddler is trying to eat a crayon. The LORD make His face shine upon you. She gets the crayon. She has been in this room, under that blessing, for eleven years, and she has never once been in the room where it is said. It has always come through the floorboards, to a woman on her knees with a wet wipe.

Here is what she would not tell the other helpers, because it sounds ungrateful and she does not have the words for it anyway. When she thinks of God looking at her, she has never once imagined the face of the boy with the red block. She has always imagined her mother's face. Not angry. Her mother was never angry. Her mother was patient, which was worse. The slight tightening at the mouth. The little breath in through the nose. The face that said, we will try again, dear, without saying anything, and that waited, and went on waiting, for her to become the person that face was waiting for. Somewhere around eleven she decided that this was what God's face was like, and she has never taken that back. Patient with her. Waiting for her. Disappointed in a way too kind to say so.

If you have ever sat under a blessing about His face shining and pictured, in the same moment, a face that was merely putting up with you, then you already know the room I am talking about. You have been in it a long time.

Which face was said over you

Come and sit with me on that floor. I want us to look at the blessing that came through the ceiling, because the shape of it has been reaching you for eleven years and I do not think anybody ever handed you the words.

The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.Numbers 6:24-25

Look at what God told the priests to say. Not "the LORD tolerate you." Not "the LORD wait for you." Make His face shine upon you. That is a face lit up. That is the face of somebody who has just seen the person they were hoping to see come through the door. In the Hebrew the word for face is plural in shape, panim, as though a face were always more than one thing at once, and it is that whole face, all of it, that the blessing asks God to turn toward you and light. He wrote that line Himself. He gave it to Aaron to say over people who had been complaining in the desert for a year, and He did not put a condition in front of it. Read it again and find the part where the shining waits for the person to improve. It is not there. It was never there.

Now let me name the weight, because you have carried it up and down those basement stairs for a long time. You do not think God hates you. You are far too faithful for that. You think He is patient with you, and you have quietly decided that patience is the most a person like you can expect from His face. So every kindness you have received from Him you have filed under "He is putting up with me," and every failure you have filed under "there it is, the tightening at the mouth." Sister, I know that face. Half the women I have ever prayed with were raised under it. And I am telling you it was never His.

You are looked at with delight, right now, on that carpet, with the crayon in your hand. I am not saying that because you had a hard morning and I want you to feel better. I am saying it because it is written, in Zephaniah, that He rejoices over you with gladness and quiets you with His love and exults over you with singing, and because the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line the minister says over your head every week and brings it down through the floor to the woman it was said for. Delight is not something you graduate into. It is the face He had before you got up this morning.

The face does not change when you drop the block

Here is where the fear digs in, so let us go and get it. You could believe, maybe, that He is delighted with you on a good day. But eleven years of ordinary days have gone by, and some very bad ones, and the face you carry is the one that changes when you fail. That is what made your mother's face so hard: it moved. It was warm when you got it right and it tightened when you did not, and you learned to read it the way a sailor reads the sky. So of course you read God's face the same way. Of course you assume that the shining is a reward and the patient face is the default.

But hear what Paul says about where the shining actually comes from. God, who said let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The face that shines on you is the face of Jesus. And what did that face do when it looked at people who had failed? It looked at Peter across a courtyard after the third denial, and it looked at a woman with a jar of ointment while the whole room tutted, and it looked at a thief who had nothing left to offer and said, today. The shining face is not the face He wears when things go well. It is the face He has. It is who He is toward you, and it was settled at the cross and not at the end of your good week.

You were never the reason the face was shining, and so you are not the reason it would stop. That is not my idea; it is the whole logic of a blessing that God had written down and told the priest to say over people who had not earned it, and it is His Spirit, and not your record, who is holding that face turned toward you tonight. Nothing you dropped this morning moved it. Nothing you drop tomorrow moves it either. The light was in the face before you walked in.

I want to be careful here, because there is a way of hearing this that turns it into homework, and I refuse to hand you homework. I am not asking you to feel delighted in. I am not saying that if you can just picture the right face, then the blessing works. The face is shining whether you can picture it or not, whether you can feel it or not, whether you are on your knees with a wet wipe or flat on your back at the end of the day with nothing left in you. You have a face turned toward you that does not consult your performance, because Scripture says He makes His face shine upon you, in the present, without a clause, and the Spirit of God is not waiting for you to deserve it before He lets you know.