To the high school Thursday afternoon, to pick up older kid for an after-school appointment. I was a little early getting there, so I sat in my car, parked on the main drag near the school, and watched as the high school students streamed out, released from captivity: singly or in clumps, acting cool or being silly, leggy or plump... I thought, watching them: what an odd stage this is to look at.

They've definitely lost all traces of the child, except to a loving (probably parental) eye that remembers 'way back. Oh, you might see the occasional round-faced kid and think to yourself, I know just what this one looked like at three or seven or ten. But on the whole, they don't have little-kid faces.

On the other hand, they don't have have adult faces either: no signs of experience there, for good or ill. The bones aren't fully formed yet, at that age, and life hasn't left many marks. Mind you, now and again, you'll see a strong-featured face and be able to guess what one will look like in his or her early 20s. But mostly, they simply look very young, even the tough ones. Almost impossible to guess what these faces will be like when their owners are 45, or 60, or 85.

Of course, our time, chronos, is strictly a straight-line thing: birth to death, hup-two-three along a one-way street. But I gather that God's time is less straightforward, less like a lockstep march and more like a bead zinging freely back and forth (and maybe in more than two dimensions, there's a thought to try to wrap your mind around--time as an n-dimensional dance?)

God's eye sees each one of these kids' teen faces, each one's baby and child face, and the face of each one's maturity and of old age, and can hold each face in mind, even the faces that haven't happened yet. Only God knows--I certainly don't!--how these faces are arranged: whether God sees them all at once or together, or flowing into and out of each other: the child out of the baby, the baby out of the old person? Certainly God does not see not the way we see the same faces; of that I think we can be tolerably sure.

And then it occured to me that my soul has a face to it, maybe not the same face as the face on the front of my head; and that for all I'm a middle-aged woman, my soul's face is still very young. Not perhaps a baby-face; maybe the face of a young teen, with the soft and gawky features just beginning to arrange themselves. Whatever state my soul's face is at right now, it's safe to say that it gives only the faintest hint of what it will look like when it's had a chance to begin to mature into whatever it is that God wants it to look like.

But of this I'm intuitively sure: there is a particular soul-face, a particular and totally individual beauty, that each of us is intended to have--just as each of these teens has a one-of-a-kind adult face in waiting. We fall short of that beauty in this life, inevitably, even the best of us. Some of us--many of us, perhaps --simply refuse to leave childhood or our teens, and stay "stuck" at some stage, usually with unhappy consequences.

Just as these kids' faces will grow, whether or not that's what they want, gaining or losing the facile sort of beauty that's a matter of skin and bone, so must I, in Christ, be changed as I grow. Some of us believe that we don't have to do all this work in a mere 80 years or so, but that we will continue in God's sight on the other side of the River. If that's the case, I cannot begin to imagine what my soul's face might look like in a thousand ages or thre.

My soul, like their faces, is being remodelled, and not by my conscious choice, but by the formative forces that guide growth. They have a class of bone cell breaking down the old bone structure and another group of cells rebuilding. I have--what? the Holy Spirit, I hope, but also my own humanity. Making my soul's face is matter of the subtlest and most complex interplay--a dance between my Creator and me, with my Creator laying down the pattern and me choosing to follow it, or to fall away from it.

I am, in a sense, no more in charge of this process than these teens are in charge of what becomes of their faces; that's hard-wired. But I can take poor care of my soul, or take actions that leave it scarred, or get a nasty case of the Uglies about it, or expect the world to revolve around it. I can act in ways that in ways that improve or dis-improve my soul's complexion. (Souls too can get zits.) I can hold up my head and smile, or I can be defiant and stone-faced, or I can lower my chin to my chest, rounding my shoulders, clutching an armful of books, and scurry on, hoping He doesn't notice. Amazing, how much difference attitude makes....

My personal teen lolloped out, all legs and gawky grace. His face is sharply defined, full of life and intelligence and mischief, when he forgets to look cool and stupid. It's still impossible to tell what sort of face it will be as his soul matures behind it. Nor can I guess what will become of the soul behind his face, except that I suspect it's going to be interesting. But that job is between him and God now; it's not my business.