I miss smiles. Don’t you? we have been covering them up for nearly a year now and there seems to be no end in sight. My smile is not as attractive as many of yours, but I still miss exchanging it with people. I miss making people smile, strangers, customers, the waitress, the checkout person at the grocery store. To see them smile is to know that you have improved their life, if only for a moment.
Is the public smile gone for good, along with the handshake? Have they gone the way of letter writing and newspapers? Are we evolving into some type of post-communal species now? Must our culture always remain covered, distant, safe, sterile and cold? How dreary. Children like to draw pictures of people; I am told that if the people they draw are smiling that is a sign the child is living in a safe and healthy environment, which makes sense. I do not wish to see what today’s children will be drawing.
The smile is both a sign and a source of healthy human interaction. The smile is the lifting of the moment, and the lifting of the heart. It is a revealing of a soul; it is the unguarded moment. It is food to a conversation, and it is nourishment to a relationship. A smile makes the eyes brighter and lifts the whole face. A smile can make a person seem instantly lighter, as if they were floating. The right smile on the right woman can make a man weak in the knees, and cause him to commit irrational acts, like marriage. 😊
We are a people starving for smiles. Most of our interactions have become uncertain, tentative. Is this person smiling at me behind their mask? Are they scowling? Are they disinterested? Our once friendly and open transactions have become reserved and guarded. Approaching each other this way is depressing and exhausting. I am praying that it will end soon and that we will have a summer filled with smiles.
Too often we approach God the way we are approaching each other today. Is he scowling? Is he disinterested? Is he smiling? Does God smile? Does he even have a smile? Look at the child in this picture; he is made in the image of God; that smile is the reflection of God’s smile. The human smile was created in the mind of God. Hiding this child’s face is like covering a work of art. His spirit is free, and his face is shining; he is incandescent.
The Hebrew poets spoke of God’s face “shining” upon you. The smile of the Almighty. Yet he is also repeatedly described as being hidden. As dwelling in “clouds and thick darkness”, being behind a veil, as if he were wearing a mask. This withdrawing, this distance, was done for our protection, not his.
The New Testament tells of the Veil of the Temple being torn apart. Jesus of Nazareth is God stepping out of the cloud and walking among us. Jesus is the living, breathing smile of God upon a weary world, a world full of people in masks. He is God without the mask. I may not be able to tell if you are smiling at me today, but because of Jesus, I can know for certain that my Heavenly Father is.
May our approach to each other begin to reflect the freedom of our approach to God. May all our faces begin to shine like the face of this child. Until then, here’s to a world without acrimony and distrust; a world without masks; a world full of smiles.
“The LORD bless you and keep you: the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” Numbers 6
“Peace begins with a smile..” Mother Teresa
“smiling in your brother’s face is an act of charity.” Arab proverb