CHILDREN DON’T MANAGE THEIR FACES
“Yeeeeeecccchhhhhh.”
He flings the lemon from his high chair, his face knotted in a ball.
Twenty pairs of eyes lock on our table as the tiny roar fills the restaurant and for a second, I want to shush him. I want to make the heat in my face dissipate and convince the onlookers that I’m a good mother. Show them that I’m in control.
But then I look at his puckered cheeks, and how his tiny mind is working to make sense of this new explosion of the world in his mouth, and I don’t care; I just don’t want to miss it. My embarrassment gets swallowed by the moment.
I read once that one of the things we love about children is that they don’t know how to manage their faces. For a few, fleeting years, children can’t be inauthentic. Their emotional life is immediate and their heart is accessible. A rare sliver of time before they learn how to mask their emotions.
We love the authenticity of children’s faces. They show delight and disgust and anger and fear, because they don’t know how to do anything else. Participating in that unguarded experience of the world is magical.
Seeing a worm wriggling in the dirt for the first time.
Feeling seafoam cling to their ankles.
Hearing a sealion roar.
And then they grow up.
WEARING MASKS LETS US HIDE OUR HEARTS
Children learn what we do instinctively. They rearrange their features into socially appropriate submission. We applaud their maturity and call it growth, but a little of the magic goes too. Children learn to manage their faces and we lose the accessibility of their hearts.
I wonder whether Jesus had that abandon in mind when he called us to come to him as children.[1]Matthew 18:3 and urged childlike faith.[2]Mark 10:15 Because children came to Jesus without anything to offer – no money, or status, or power. But children also come without pretense.
Jesus rebuked the people who came to him with calculated words and lists of good works. He chastised people who came with tight filters and pretty masks.[3]Luke 18:9-14 But Jesus threw his arms wide to children clamoring for his attention. Jesus welcomed little ones who came with unguarded confidence of belonging, not pretending to be anything other than what they are.[4]Mark 10:14
Which is hard.
It is hard to live unmasked when we are constantly viewed but rarely seen: framed in little squares and curated clips; the picture of life rather than the reality of it. And sometimes we manage our faces and our words and our bodies to survive. The childlike way we first ran to God gets lost. Life teaches us that people aren’t always safe and questions are not always welcome. We learn to rearrange our features and calculate our words and push down our honest experience of the world.
Even with God.
We would rather come to him tidy and measured than messy and undone. Better to be safe than known. Sometimes, we baptize that fear and call it piety, when all we are really doing is managing our faces and shutting off our hearts.
GROWING UP MEANS BECOMING LIKE A CHILD
We are supposed to grow up. Children aren’t meant to stay little forever. Except that growing up is so often the opposite of what we expect. We get that Jesus talks about being reborn[5]John 3:5 but then somehow, between doing the things we think we should and feeling guilty over the ones we shouldn’t, we forget how babies grow.
Babies grow by being held, lying skin to skin, bare and vulnerable, on their parent’s chest. And then, when they can walk and talk and disobey and fail, children only really grow when they are fully known and fully loved.
So do we.
I am too often a disciple in the crowd, rebuking the children.[6]Mark 10:13-14 I push down the parts of my heart that need to run to Jesus, wishing they would be quiet or disappear or just grow up. I orphan them instead of letting them grow. Instead, I need to remember that coming to Jesus as a child is not a call we were ever meant to fully move past.[7]John 21:5 That it isn’t the first way we come to him but the only way we ever can.
God doesn’t care how well we wear a pretty mask.
God doesn’t care how well we wear a pretty mask.
SEEANEWTHING
What would it mean to stop managing our faces? To come to Jesus with the immediacy and accessibility of a child? Bedraggled and windblown? Trusting that his goal was never really for us to behave but to know him?
I hand my son another piece of lemon, knowing this time it won’t be the same. The newness of the world will be blunted. He will start to feel their stares. I hand him the lemon and smile, knowing that this precious vulnerability – my access to his world – is already slipping. He will manage his face and I will miss the accessibility of his heart.
And Jesus will still call him. Jesus will call all the pieces of his little heart – all the places that I can’t fully know and so can’t fully love – to himself. Just like he still calls mine, until our whole selves are settled on his chest.
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