Face Blindness

I learned the other day that every time one person looks at another person, a special part of our brains kicks into gear that helps us see the intricate details of each others’ faces.

The reason for that is a good one—it’s so that we can tell each other apart.

There are hopefully people in your life who are important to you, and hopefully there are people out there who think of you as important.

But the fact is that pretty much everybody you ever meet has the same number of eyes and noses and mouths, and those parts are all located in pretty much the same places on your best friends as they are on your worst enemies.

Even though human beings are very different from one another, human faces are not really all that different from one another.

But regardless of facial similarity, most of us want to keep the same people in our lives, not just people who pretty much look the same. So while it might make it a lot easier to pick up kids from school if all you had to do was grab the right number of kids who were approximately the right size and shape, I think we can all agree that it’s a really important thing to be able to tell people apart from one another for lots of different reasons.

So, in order to make certain that we all know who is who, our brains are specifically designed to notice the very slight differences between human faces so that we can very accurately tell each other apart. In fact, without that special design, we wouldn’t be able to tell each other apart any more than we can tell apart a herd of identical-looking sheep.

However, once in a great while, this particular part of somebody's brain actually gets broken. When that happens, people get a condition called “face blindness,” in which they can literally not see the difference between people's faces. And this condition is so severe that, even though the person can see other things perfectly well, a person with face blindness cannot identify the faces of even their closest friends and family.

Thankfully, face blindness is a rare condition so not very many people have it.

But I mention it today because I’m wondering if maybe—just maybe—you might think that God has face blindness for you.

We talk about God quite a bit in our culture. His name comes up regularly in conversation and in different kinds of songs, and He usually sounds at least somewhat special and important. And He is.

But do you ever feel like, to God, you are maybe not special and important? Like God might be very interested in people, in general, or at least interested in other people, but when God looks at you, He just sees another face in the crowd?

I think a lot of people feel that way. And if you’re one of them, I have great news for you today.

God is not blind to you. In fact, He sees you perfectly.

There is an old song in the Bible that is about exactly this subject. Psalm 139 starts out and says:

O Lord, you have searched me

and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue

you know it completely, O Lord.

It goes on like that for a while, and I would encourage you to look it up and read it. And as you do that, remember: wherever you are, wherever you’re going, whatever you’re thinking, God sees you. There is no blindness in Him. He sees you and He cares.

And for me, that changes everything.

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