Wash Your Face, He Said

She caught herself doing it in the hallway mirror on the way out.

Not fixing her hair. The opposite. She had a look on, a slightly tired, slightly noble look, and when she registered it she understood, in about a second and a half, that she had been wearing it since roughly nine in the morning and that it was for other people.

Which is mortifying, and she stood there for a moment being mortified.

Because that is how she has always known it was working. That is the whole quiet system she has been running since she was nineteen: if it is hard, it counts. If it shows, it counts more. A week where she barely noticed anything would be a week that did not really happen, and a week where she was visibly running on fumes by Thursday was a good one, and she has never once said that sentence out loud because saying it out loud makes it sound insane.

She is thirty-eight. She has been keeping score with her own face for nineteen years.

If you have got a look you put on, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to make you take it off, and nobody is going to tell anyone you were wearing it.

The one instruction He actually gave was about your face

Here is the thing that should be famous and somehow is not.

Jesus never sets a length for this. He never names a kind. He never gives a method, a schedule, a build-up or a way to finish. There is no technique anywhere in His teaching on it, and people have been filling that silence in with material ever since.

What He does give is one instruction, and it is this.

Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast.Matthew 6:16

Your face. The single practical direction attached to the subject, from Him, is about your face, and it is: do not let it show.

Read what that makes impossible. It makes it impossible to run her system. If the visible difficulty is deliberately removed, then there is nothing left to grade the week by, which means there was never a grade, which means nineteen years of scoring was scoring in a competition that does not exist.

You are free of a scoreboard that was never actually put up. Matthew 6:16 is where that sits, in the one place He gave a practical instruction on the subject at all, and the same Spirit who carried those words through Matthew is the one who makes a woman in a hallway able to laugh instead of flinch.

Hard is not the currency, and it never was

Now the part that has to be said gently, because there is a real fear underneath the system.

If it does not cost, does it count. That is the question, and it is not a stupid question, and half of Christian teaching has been built on getting it wrong in one direction or the other.

Here is the honest answer. Something being difficult is not what makes it real. A thing can be enormously hard and be entirely about you. A thing can be almost effortless and be one of the truest moments of your life. Difficulty is not a measurement of anything, and Jesus removes it as a measurement in the plainest way available to Him: He tells you to hide the evidence.

And notice what He says about the people who do let it show. They have their reward. Not: they will be punished. They got the thing they were going for. Somebody noticed. That was the whole transaction and it completed.

He is not calling her a hypocrite in a hallway. He is telling her that the thing she has been working for is very small and she is allowed to stop.

You have been offered something considerably better than being noticed, and it was on the table the entire nineteen years. He promised it, in the same passage, where the Father who sees in secret does the rewarding Himself (Matthew 6:18), and His Spirit does not need your week to look like anything from the outside.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go further, this outranks all of it, and I would say it to my own daughter.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there never will be.

And I want to be very direct about one thing, because of what this article is about. Nothing here admires anybody for running on fumes. Being visibly depleted is not a spiritual achievement and it is not being praised on this page in any form. If any of this touches an old and difficult relationship with food or with your own body, please put the subject down and talk to a doctor, and that is not a lesser path, it is the wise one.

You are not being ranked, and you were not being ranked in any of those nineteen years. Romans 2:11 says God is no respecter of persons, and the Holy Spirit has never once been handed out according to how depleted anybody managed to get.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.