Aimee Byrd is a best-selling author multiple times over, and this book is filled with personal stories, reflections, wisdom, and encouragement. This book processes some of that hurt, and she seeks healing through pursuing God’s face and faithfulness even in difficult times.
Although it would not be necessary to be familiar with C.S. Lewis’s book “Till We Have Faces” to appreciate this work, there are many references to Lewis’s book, plot, theme, and characters and it sets the stage for and informs Byrd’s book.
Preface: A Face that Fits
“We are all looking for God’s face. This is the blessing: to see God’s face, to see God’s face looking at our face, to see God’s face delighting in our face. Then we will know who we are. Then we will know we are loved. Then we will feel in our bones how we matter (pxi).”
Prelude: Till We Have Faces
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis “brilliantly reveals human struggle to unearth the truth about ourselves, about who we are, what we’re made of, what we love, and most importantly who loves us. Before the divine face, the veil falls off, and we get to look in the mirror that Christ holds up for us (pxviii).”
Part One: The Reflective Face
Chapter One: Looking for My Face
“With the loss of those I thought would be lifetime friends. And this is still my journey: finding my own face and looking for Christ’s face in the faces of others (p10).” “Journaling has been a valuable part of the work I am doing not only to heal from church harm and disillusionment but also to reach the blessings to see and experience Christ and to do so in the face of the people before me (p10).”
Chapter Two: Past, Present, and Eternal Mirrors
“We learn more about ourselves from others’ gazes than we do by their words (p16).”
“Experiencing disillusionment with the church and my friends helped me see that my ‘rich’ picture was disillusioned already. The blessedness of poverty is being able to see what’s real and finding true riches (p19).”
Chapter Three: What Is Held Inside
“‘Finding our face’ is really about integration, about becoming whole in our longings, emotions, faith, knowledge, behavior, and relationships (p27).” “The technology inside our cell phones, tablets, and other screens often draws out darker parts of us – our longing for approval, artificial connections, insatiable desires to consume, compare, criticize, and worse (p28).” “This church search is going to take more patience. I don’t know if I have any more. But you are so patient with us, Lord. … Help us notice the glimpses of you (p36).”
Chapter Four: What Does the Mirror Reveal?
“Women are at the entrance of the tent of meeting for a reason. They are mirrors of the radiance and glory of Christ’s bride. … How vile it was for Eli’s sons to defile them! (p41).”
Part Two: The Fractured Face
Chapter Five: Disruptions to Our Sense of Self
“We are so busy looking for faces that delight in us that we don’t realize how we are hustling to construct a face we think others, including God, will delight in (p47).” “How could I have thought that the teaching for church members and the protection offered to them was for the women too (p51).”
“Why does God let us carry on so long with fractured faces? (p52).”
Chapter Six: A Good Name
“We knew one another front, back, and inside out. So I thought. Turns out I really didn’t know myself (p57).” “If we ask this question from the wisdom gleaned in Ecclesiastes, we will think less about what good name we are trying to create and more about what our souls, like cisterns, have been holding inside all our lives (p61).” “It’s a scary thing, though, when the ones that you rely on to be there with Christ’s love don’t have it to offer you (p64).”
Chapter Seven: Communing with Eternity
“The fracture in our faces, in the world, is in not being able to see what’s real and commune with it (p73).” “We see this promise fulfilled in Christ who hears us, stands before a holy God, and answers the call with his whole self, bringing us before the Father, ‘Here am I and the children God has given me’ (p77).”
Part Three: The Blessed Face
Chapter Nine: God Showed Us His Face
“We grieve the darkness, lament injustice, mourn our sin, and wait and watch together for Christ’s face to shine upon us (p97).” “So we visited a Methodist church in town. I never thought I would go to a Methodist church. … ‘Lord, I am looking for Christ in your church. Help me to see him if he’s there.’ He was (p98).”
Chapter Ten: Provocations to Blessing
“There is a pain and loneliness in not being known and in not serving. … We are unlearning. We are unpopular (p116).” “For now, we warm the seats with thankfulness that we have held onto the friendships that survived and for the new ones we’ve made (p117).”
Chapter Eleven: Facing God’s Face – A Sermon
“We get to covenantally participate in the Father’s great love for the Son by the Spirit (p123).” “And all this blossoming, singing, springtime language [in the Song of Songs] reminds us of God’s promises to restore the land, restore his people (p124).” “We parse careful theological statements and miss the love and dynamism behind them (p128).” “We are being summoned to know Christ and all he has to show us – beautiful reality (p129).”
Part Four: The Naked Face
Chapter Twelve: Looking for Marks of His Glory in One Another
“How was it okay for this presbyter to misrepresent my work with his authoritative voice and poison the well to the whole presbytery? But I had no power to defend it. How was that in order? (p135).”
“The message was clear: you don’t belong here (p136).”
“In retrospect, it was one of the most traumatizing experiences of my life (pp137-138).” “I went to that presbytery meeting seeking oversight, protection, and care, only to be mocked by church officers (p139).”
“We need leaders who see what Christ sees, who give us keys not cages, and who aren’t led by fear, don’t enable harm, and can hold and tend to our wounds (p139).”
Chapter Thirteen: What the Face Demands
“So often, we rob others and ourselves of the blessings and healing God is ready to give us when we are unwilling to be vulnerable (p151).”
Chapter Fourteen: Discovering the Death of the Other
“So often, when you ask God to give you what’s real, you have a hard time seeing it because you still have a lot of work to do in shedding all your faux securities and certainties (p159).” “Sometimes when you say, ‘I’m not who you think I am,’ they don’t want to recognize the you that is coming out of hiding (p159).” “Trauma is the absence of empathetic witness from the people who are supposed to care (p160).”
Chapter Fifteen: He Can’t Look at Her Face
“‘Lesser power has no woman than this, that her life is laid down by a man’ (p169).” “I ask you, what do we do with one of the most horrific and evil portions of God’s word? (p170).” “How we treat our women reveals our eschatological anticipation of joy (p170).”
Part Five: The Maturing Face
Chapter Sixteen: The Legacy of Our Faces
“God keeps showing up in peculiar places. What a joy to discover him over and over (p180).”
Chapter Seventeen: The Riddle of the Owls
“But don’t get tangled up into thinking that people with the most right information are the spiritually mature. … The revelation of the lack of spiritual and emotional maturity among church leaders and academics is going to knock you off your feet for a while (p188).” “‘I am not sure it is possible to see the face of God in other people if you cannot see the faces they already have.’ Of course, this is hard to do when we are still forming our own faces (p189).”
Chapter Eighteen: Anna, Face-to-Face with Jesus
“Face-to-face, we too begin to see the secret: Jesus. He shows us the face of God. We can see God’s face in each other and through the ages (p203).”
Invitation: Let Me See Your Face
“We continue to listen and look for his face in our selves and one another, joining in his summons, our hearts leaping a bit at each little ‘here I am’, until we get to that final beholding – till we have faces that will behold the face of God in Jesus together, at last (p208).”
Byrd has made herself vulnerable, revealing her face and showing her heart in this book. She shares glimpses of unfair and harmful ways her church and presbytery treated her and then looks to God for strength and hope. Her story will resonate with many, especially women, who have been spiritually abused and whose voices have been silenced.