A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my daughter, who is three. She is beautiful and wonderful and animated, and she is at that frustratingly charming age when her little voice knows exactly what she wants to say, but her pronunciation may or may not deliver on that count. Also frustratingly, her mother is at that less-beautiful and less-charming age where she is distracted by apperoximately 9,000,000 things at any given point in time, be that the plot of the book she’s listening to on audio, the TikTok song that’s stuck in her head, the dinner requests of her older child, or simply the sound of the washing machine running, ever-present, in the background. So, as do many of our conversations, this occurred with approximately 50% of the required attention on my part. 

I know, regrettable. 

As I’m multi-tasking with my precious child, I hear the phrase, “Mommy, we will see God’s face! And I will love to see God’s face.” And as I turned my eyes to her own, I beheld the earnest joy she grasped in the assurance that one day, she would behold God. I was dumbstruck and delighted. And humbled.

And I thought, how do I tell her? How do I tell her that I feel a glimpse of it everyday in her wrinkle-scrunched nose? That I see God’s face in fragments and remnants and slivers when she and her brother slide a freckled arm around each other’s shoulders, a brief reprieve from the bickers and the tattles? That in her own eyes, when she flips her face to meet mine, I thank God for the tiny space of glory this life is; praise be for finding the shadows of  God’s face in our precious and bedraggled everyday. Praise be.