The self portrait.
The instructions give us a guide. Fold the paper into halves to find the center. First draw the forehead, then an arch down the paper to create the chin. Next follows the eyes and the nose. Step by step, add ears and lips and neck and shoulders. Finally design your hairstyle on top.
But what do we look like? How do we see ourselves?
Our kids, who often tend to copy the model we give them, set out on their own today. Not a single person shared colors or even shapes from the example. Pencil lines, later darkened by Sharpie, mark out the faces. Watercolor paints fill in the spaces. Colors bleed and seep and run dark into light.
Boys sketch the figures with their features, long faces, short hair. Some have eyes, small and squinty. Others make pupils that stare at you. A few create a gaze that peers deep into the distance. Mouths curl in crooked scowls, seldom a smile to be seen. Their hair forms universally short, sometimes even spiky. A few add ball caps on an angle and initials to boast where their allegiances might lie. Occasionally a mustache and beard shows up, even though such probably won't be seen on the artists' own faces for years into the future. Our few girls work more slowly, determined to create true likeness. They sketch and erase and then try again. Their hair hangs long and wavy. One adds jewelry to her ears.
But the colors. Perhaps it is the colors that say the most. We wonder why he chooses a gray-green pallor, this beautiful Mexican boy with perfect coffee melanin. We smile at the always present red and white and green of their patria. The girls pick bright pinks and deep purples and sunflower yellows. We worry about the reemergence of blacks and dark grays, palettes that had faded in the past year but have slowly and steadily returned.
We hang their works up on the line across the wall and we recognize the faces of our young friends. Yet we also acknowledge that these simple portraits are a small window into so much more. When given the task of identifying the future king, the Lord told Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” We pray, give us the same ability, so see and to love these kids as the Lord himself does.
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