Taken from His Face Like Mine by Russell Joyce. From chapter 1, “The God Who Kisses Our Wounds”:

One night years back, my fiancée, Anna, and I were making out. She lived with six other women in a house in Portland, Oregon, and we found ourselves alone, which didn’t happen often. We decided to take advantage of the privacy. We were in our midtwenties, had been together for a year, were recently engaged, and swooning over each other. It was a happy season. In the middle of this moment, she suddenly pulled back.

“Stop that,” she said.

I was confused. I hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant. I hoped it wasn’t my kissing.

“Do you know you always do that?” she asked. “Every time I try and kiss the left side of your face, you don’t let me. You either pull my lips onto yours, or you start telling me you love me and how beautiful I am. You won’t just let me kiss you.

”I was stunned. “Do you not think I see you?” she asked. “Like, all of you?”

I exhaled as if punched in the stomach. She continued, “Do you not think I love all of you? Let me kiss you.”

I sat dumbstruck, cut open by her words. I genuinely had no idea I was attempting to hide the “bad side” and making her kiss what I deemed to be the “good side.” I didn’t know how to respond or process what she had just revealed to me about myself. I was exposed without any explanation to offer.

“Sit back,” she said, her fingers pressing into my sternum and guiding me into the couch. “Look at me.”

I did.

She reached out her right hand and began to pull her fingertips across the left side of my face, back and forth, over my brokenness. Her fingertips traced my sunken left cheek where my cheek bone never grew and my bumpy, angular, reconstructed ear. She followed the red line of a giant scar that goes from the edge of my mouth to my ear. Her fingers touched every spot of imperfection on my face.

It took everything within me not to cry out in rage. I felt so vulnerable I thought I was going to faint. My cynicism wanted to spit at her. But since I had never let someone into that vulnerable space, I was terrified. The cynicism was my defense. I hated all of it. I don’t want your pity, I wanted to scream at her. I know what I look like. I know how broken I am. Stop patronizing me. I don’t need it and I don’t need you! I was so angry at everything and everyone.

But she didn’t stop. She kept touching my wounded face. After tracing the outlines of the checkered ridges, misplaced bones, and red scars, she tilted her head forward and began to kiss me. First, she kissed the top of my broken ear. Then the ridges of my ear. Then my underdeveloped jaw. She kissed me slowly and with intention. Her lips would touch as much flesh as possible, holding the pose for as long as it took for me to realize what she was communicating.

She wanted me to know and feel that she was kissing my wounded face. And she wanted me to know that she was choosing to kiss it. No one was forcing her. She wanted to kiss my wounded face because she loved me. Not the me I thought I was or the me I should be, but the real me, the one I thought I had been hiding from her. The deformed, broken, weak, deceptive, humiliated, wounded me. She wanted to kiss that me.

She wasn’t repulsed by my wounds. She wasn’t overlooking them. She saw them for what they were, and she knew that there would be no me without them and the stories they told of my life. So she loved them. Because they made the real me. And she loved the real me.

As she tenderly kissed every inch of wounded flesh on my face—every mark that carried the tragic baggage of all the rejections I had ever experienced, all the stares I had ever garnered, all the teasing I had ever been subject to, all my self-loathing—the shock and rage in my body began to give way. It melted within me. What replaced that rage was an emotion without a name. The closest thing I can call it is grief. Deep grief. Yet it transcended even that. I think it was a death. Something was dying in that moment.

I began to wail. I cried harder than I’ve ever cried in my life. I had always subconsciously believed that if I were ever to be truly seen for what I was, that if I couldn’t distract someone by making them look at the good parts of me, then they would reject me. Because that’s what wounded people receive—rejection. But now, for the first time ever, I knew I was truly being seen for what I was and that I was freely chosen as I was. Of course, I had been chosen and loved throughout my life by my parents and brothers. But the narrative I believed was that if my family had been honest, they would not have chosen me, not loved me, not kissed me. In my mind, they were overlooking my wounds because they were compelled to do so.

This is why the moment with Anna was so powerful. Anna was not family, and I knew she saw the real me. She called it out. I couldn’t hide. She wasn’t bound to me by blood. If she wanted to love me, it was her free choice. She kissed my wounded face over and over, and sorrow and pain emptied from my soul. She spoke no words. She didn’t stop. In that space of utter brokenness, I was deemed worthy of her love. And I encountered God like never before.

Taken from His Face Like Mine by Russell Joyce. ©2024 by Russell Joyce. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.