To Touch the Face of God

John Gillespie Magee, Jr., was born in Shanghai, China to missionary parents. His dad had been a wealthy man but chose to become an Anglican priest and was sent to China where he met his wife. John was born on June 9, 1922. In World War II, John flew for the RAF (Royal Canadian Air Force) and on his first solo flight in a Spitfire reached the altitude of 33,000 feet. The experience inspired him to write a poem when he landed. On December 11, 1941, John was killed in a training exercise when his formation of four Spitfires looped earthward, broke through the cloud deck directly in the path of an oncoming aircraft, and John's Spitfire collided with it and crashed. He was 19.

The poem he wrote, High Flight, hung in my house during my late childhood years. It was carved into a wooden shield that hung on the wall of my dad's den. I read it almost daily, memorized it, pressed my fingers into the grooves of the carved letters, and thought about the face of God. I never knew John's history, only having discovered it recently, but I knew one thing. I wanted to know the God John knew, the one who has a face.

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air…

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew –

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

God used the words in this poem to draw me to himself, not words of the Bible, but earthly words that lifted my sights higher than my native ability to see. He used art the same way. Life too. 

Do you know that ordinary, human stories of ordinary humans acting in courage and self-sacrifice draw us toward God? Stories of beauty, integrity, and human interaction with nature pulls back the veil and gives us a glimpse of God. I guess what I am trying to say is that you don't need to preach a sermon from a pulpit to expose people to the reality that God created us for the sole purpose of entering into a relationship with us. You only need to share your life in such a way people begin to believe that God has a face. 

Every time you level mountains and fill in valleys to bring about justice, you reveal the face of God. 

Every time you share another's humiliation by identifying with them instead of separating yourself from them, you reveal the face of God. 

Every time you defer judgement until you've had a chance to walk in the other's shoes yourself, you reveal the face of God.

Every time you share beauty instead of hoarding it to yourself, you reveal the face of God.

You create a yearning for God. You give people like me courage to put out a hand and feel for God's face, which is God's purpose that we would "seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us" (Acts 17:27 NLT).

My dear friends, begin to believe that God is not very far away. But do more than believe, prove it. Love God and love others in such a way that the people in your world will yearn for a relationship with him, because they see the face of God... in you.