Weather Got Into This Face

There is a road out past our place that runs seven miles with no trees on it, and everybody who has ever farmed along it has the same face by fifty.

I do not mean that unkindly. I mean it as a matter of fact, the way you would say that the fence posts on the west side go first. Wind does what wind does, and sun does what sun does, and a face that has been out in both for thirty years shows it.

And I have watched women on that road get to about forty five and start reading their own faces as a bill coming due.

That is the thing I want to get at. Not the weather. The reading.

Because the same set of marks can be read two entirely different ways, and nobody ever told you there was a choice, and one of the two readings arrived so early that it does not feel like a reading at all. It feels like just looking.

Here is what the harsh reading says. It says: damage. It says every one of those lines is a subtraction, a place where something used to be smooth and now is not, and the total is going up every year, and there is no bottom to it.

Here is what the other reading says, and I will be plain that it is a reading and not a fact. It says: record. It says a face out in the weather for thirty years is the face of a woman who was outside, doing things, in the actual world, and that the marks are where the life touched her.

I am not going to tell you the second one is more true. I am going to tell you it is at least as true, and that you have only ever been shown one of them.

Two readings of one face

Let me push on the harsh reading for a minute, because it presents itself as the honest one and it should be made to prove that.

It says the marks are damage. But damage is a word that means something got broken. And nothing on that face is broken. Every part of it works, it is all doing the job it was made for, and it has been doing that job outdoors, which is harder than doing it indoors.

Call something damage and you have already decided that a different version of it was the real one, and that this version is a falling away from it. That is a large claim and nobody ever argued for it. It was assumed at about nineteen and never revisited.

You are calling something damage that has never once stopped working, and the word arrived long before anybody thought about whether it fit. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman where a word was assumed rather than chosen, and Psalm 121 says something about the sun and a person out under it that has nothing to do with harm.

And there is a second problem with the harsh reading, which is that it can never be satisfied.

If the marks are damage, then the situation is worse every year forever and there is no year in which the account improves. That is not a reading a person can live under. It is a countdown, and a countdown will take the pleasure out of every single photograph for the rest of your life.

A reading that has no possible good outcome in it should be suspected on those grounds alone.

You are living under a reading that has never once been able to deliver a good year, and that has never once been a sign that a reading is honest. Scripture in Psalm 121 puts a keeper over the person who is out in the sun all day, and the Spirit of God is the one who offers a woman a second way of reading the same face.

The LORD is thy keeper

The hundred and twenty first Psalm is a walking psalm, written for people on a road, and it says something practical.

The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. (Psalm 121:5 and 6, King James Version)

Now, I want to handle that honestly, because a careless preacher could turn it into a promise about skin and it is not one.

The sun does affect a face. That verse is not a claim that weather has no effect on a body, and anybody who has stood in a July field knows better. The word smite in that psalm means struck down, ruined, undone. It is about a traveler collapsing on a road, not about a line at the corner of an eye.

And what it says is that on a long road, in real sun, there was a keeper the whole time.

You are somebody who has been kept through thirty years of weather rather than worn down by it, and the sun has never once had the last word on a person under that keeping. It is written in Psalm 121 that the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reads a face back to a woman as kept rather than as ruined.

And look at where the psalm puts the shade. Upon thy right hand. Right beside somebody who is walking, all day, in the open.

It does not take the person off the road. It does not offer indoor work. The whole psalm assumes a life spent out in it, and puts somebody alongside for the duration.

That is the story your face is actually telling. Thirty years out in it, and kept all the way through.

You are wearing the record of a road you were accompanied on, and there has never once been a mile of it where the shade was not at your right hand. The Spirit of God is what turns a tally into a testimony in a woman looking at her own reflection, and the written word says the Lord is thy keeper.

Ten minutes, warm, and still

So here is the thing I would have you do, and it is not about your face at all, which is deliberate.

Sit somewhere warm for ten minutes tonight with nothing in your hands.

By a fire, if there is one. In a warm kitchen. In a bath. In a chair by a radiator with a blanket. Whatever is available.

Nothing in your hands. No phone, no cup, no book, no work.

You are permitted to hold nothing at all for a few minutes, and empty hands have never once meant a wasted afternoon. Psalm 121 says the Lord is thy keeper, the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand, and the Holy Spirit is what makes standing still into being kept.

Here is why. A woman who has been outdoors for thirty years has a body that is nearly always braced for something. The weather, the work, the next thing. And ten minutes of warmth with no task attached is the one thing that has almost never been on the schedule.

This is not skin care and it is not going to change anything about your face, and I would not tell you it was. It is care of the plainest possible kind, which is being warm and doing nothing, and it is the thing you would give any tired person who came to your kitchen.

You are able to be warm and idle for ten minutes without owing anybody an account of it, and there has never once been a rule that rest had to be earned. The written word in Psalm 121 puts a keeper beside somebody on a long road, and the Holy Spirit is what makes ten warm minutes into care rather than into wasted time.