During the pandemic, we missed many things, some of which we previously took for granted. It wasn’t until wearing a face mask became the norm, that we realized how strange it was not to see the faces of those around us. For those longing to see faces with their wonderful diversity, Roger Hutchison’s Faces: A Love Story, published by Paraclete Press, will be an especially welcome book.

The book’s narrator is God, the Artist of all of us. This painter-God delights in the varying colors and shapes of the faces of God’s created beings. Hutchison’s illustrations share this delight, with close-ups of a wide variety of faces of various shades on people young and old, happy and sad.

God longs to be close to us but recognizes that we are separated from each other because of our “assumptions, preconceptions, misunderstandings, even a pandemic of fear.” Yet God knows there is a longing in us to touch, know, and walk with each other, although we have lost the ability to trust. The book ends with God’s reassurance that God will never leave us, and that God is “the artist of all that is. Of you.”

This is a picture book, with the illustrations as much a part of the book as the words, but it is certainly not a book just for children. Besides children’s ministry, I can imagine Faces being used in intergenerational programs or as a meditative tool for individuals.