The Face of God

If God was a person, sitting across from you right now, how would he look at you? When you’d talk to Him, what expression would animate His face? Would it be like your Dad’s—that time you did that thing, and he grounded you for a month? Or would it look like your mom’s, the time you told her you messed up? You were afraid she’d be angry, but instead, she held you even though you thought you were too big for holding.

If Jesus met you for coffee, do you think you’d look at Him in the eye? When He asks you how you’re doing, and you start explaining the thing that is breaking your heart right now—do you think He’d roll his eyes? As if to say, “Here she goes again.” Or would He listen, like your best friend does? His eyes never leaving you, and only interrupting to ask good, related questions to your struggles. Would annoyance flood His face? Or compassion?

When you go about your day to day life, how do you think God looks at you? Writer, Anne Lamott says, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” I have always taken this at face value, thinking it means only the people outside of you that you hate. But the truth is, some of us hate ourselves more than anyone we’ve ever met. And, somewhere along the line we began to think, God must too.

Hate is such a strong word. Too strong for me to ever use in describing how I feel about myself. Yet I would be lying, if I said I haven’t projected my own bad feelings about myself on God. As if I never thought He was so over my struggles with food, so disappointed in the decisions I made about boys, or so sick and tired of my prayers. Sometimes, we make God in our own image and decide He doesn’t like us.

But God wouldn’t be God, if we created Him. God wouldn’t be God if His opinions were exactly like mine. And finally God wouldn’t be God, if love wasn’t how He feels about all of His children (John 3:16). Sure, many of our actions grieve Him. Yes, He is calling us to live lives different from what we gravitate towards—ones that will bring us true life and freedom. But that doesn’t mean He has stone walled us. It doesn’t mean He would treat us like an angry authoritarian or an uninterested friend.

Perhaps we have been too busy making God in our own image. Perhaps we have spent too much time away from His Word that we have forgotten what is true. Or perhaps, we’ve never heard the truth and so all we have to go off of, is our image. Whatever the case, wherever we are, God has not changed (Malachi 3:6). His love is greater than all of our mistakes or places of shame. And the way that He is looking at you today, is quite possibly better than you can imagine (Zephaniah 3:17).