The Faces we Present, Hide and Reveal
A Review of
Saving Face: Finding My Self, God, and One Another Outside a Defaced Church
Aimee Byrd
Paperback: Zondervan, 2025
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Reviewed by Ann Byle
Aimee Byrd knows a thing or two about faces. She’s faced backlash from her book Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood; she’s searched for her own face as she works through trauma; she’s found grace in the faces of others; she longs to see the face of God.
Now she writes about the many facets of the faces we present to others, the face God presents to us, and how others’ faces help and hurt us in her new book Saving Face. Doing this work, she says, “develops my face” and “it has convinced me the church needs to develop her face” (xxii).
The book is divided into sections titled The Reflected Face, The Fractured Face, The Blessed Face, The Naked Face, and The Maturing Face. Within each section, chapters explore the facets of that face. Byrd relies on story, scripture, and her journal entries to make her points. She looks deep into C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and, somewhat surprisingly, the biblical Song of Songs.
Especially poignant to me is the Maturing Face section. I write this as I wait in the ER with my elderly father, whose dementia and physical struggles prompted this visit. “The faces we have age and humble us,” Byrd says. While she speaks of the spirituality of faces and I speak of the physicality of the moment, her words resonate: “We want to be face-to-face with God so that we can finally see, finally be, and finally see that he sees me. I am blessed to experience some of this presence in the faces of my own parents’ attunement” (178).
Saving Face is not a book easily skimmed or quickly digested. Byrd’s writing is layered and high-density, yet it is a valuable study of the faces we present, hide, and reveal. It is even more valuable as we consider the face of God’s church, a face often hidden behind our human motivations but, ultimately, revealed as God’s alone.
Byrd’s final comment sums up her work: “We continue to listen and look for his face in our selves and one another, joining in his summons, our hearts leaping a bit at each little ‘here I am,’ until we get to that final beholding—till we have faces that will behold the face of God in Jesus Christ together, at last” (208).
Ann Byle
Ann Byle lives in West Michigan with her science teacher husband, Ray. Their young adult children are in and out regularly. Ann writes for Christianity Today and Publishers Weekly, among other publications, and is author of Chicken Scratch: Lessons on Living Creatively from a Flock of Hens.
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