Face It.

Face It!

Before we understand words, before we can put words to our thoughts, we can read.  But it’s not words on a page that we’re reading—it’s faces!

We don’t need the research to tell us this.  All we have to do is look at our babies. See how they are watching?  They are watching and they are reading very carefully—without a single word, they are reading all about our love, our joy, our anger, our sadness, our hope. 

Did you know that of all the living creatures on earth, human beings are among only five species that recognize our own faces?  Besides us, great apes, Asian elephants, Eurasian magpies, and bottlenose dolphins recognize their faces in a mirror. (Source: National Geographic...please see link below). But human beings are alone in the range of emotions we feel when gazing at our own reflections, and reading the faces of others.

I wonder, sometimes, how it must feel to be so completely rejected by society that people won’t even look—they only turn their faces away so they don’t have to expose themselves and read the pain, the hunger, the desperation on the faces of those they walk by.  I wonder, but the people we are helping at PATH (the agency where I work with some pretty amazing people to help end homelessness in Los Angeles) don’t have to—they experience that pain of rejection every single day. 

Every. Single. Day.

We often hear talk about the different ways people communicate.  With phones ringing and computers buzzing all around us, most of the time we think of communication in terms of words.  It’s verbal.  But there are other ways we communicate, ways often more powerful than with words—the so-called “non-verbals” like body posture, and facial expression. 

And so I ask, friends, what sort of message are you sending today?  What are people reading on your face?  Is it care?  Concern?  Hope?  Is it frustration, or impatience?  And what are you reading on the faces of those who have been rejected simply because they haven’t yet made it home?

It might just be a look—YOUR powerful look TODAY—that finally gets a message through—that someone really cares—turning the page and opening the door for healing to happen.