“Saving Face” with Aimee Byrd

by on June 6, 2025

Have you ever felt unseen in a place where you were supposed to be known? Or like the more you tried to bring your true self forward, the more you were asked to hide it?

Today on the podcast, author Aimee Byrd joins Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen to talk about her new book, Saving Face: Finding My Self, God, and One Another Outside a Defaced Church. 

It’s a deeply personal and theological reflection on spiritual abuse, identity, and healing—especially in the wake of church systems that no longer reflect the face of Christ.

Together, they explore what it means to reclaim your face—your personhood, your story, your sacred calling. Aimee draws on the rich insight of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote that the face is not merely a physical feature, but the place where we encounter both God and one another. To truly see another’s face is to take responsibility for their dignity and to recognize Christ’s presence there.

Aimee shares her story of how a system that promised reform instead left her mocked, erased, and dehumanized. In that disillusionment, she came to a painful but powerful realization: we don’t just need reform. We need resurrection. A death to false forms of power, toxic moralism, and spiritual posturing—and a return to humility, presence, and love.

This conversation offers an honest look at the loneliness of holding onto your God-given identity when others turn away, the courage it takes to seek the face of God in others, and the deep hope that emerges when we begin to see—and be seen—face to face.

 

About Our Guest:

Aimee Byrd is a former coffee cafe owner who now uses her conversational barista skills as a writer and speaker. Her latest books blend contemplative thought with biblical theology. She lives in her hometown in Frederick, MD with her husband, Matt, and three young adult children who are in and out of the house. 

Aimee is the author of Saving Face, The Hope in Our Scars, The Sexual Reformation, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Why Can’t We Be Friends?, No Little Women, Theological Fitness, and Housewife Theologian. She is a former cohost of Mortification of Spin podcast for the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, and currently cohost of Birds of a Feather YouTube cast with Mike Bird. Aime has articles published in Table Talk, Modern Reformation, First Things, By Faith, New Horizons, Ordained Servant, Common Good, Harvest USA, Credo Magazine, and was interviewed and quoted in Christianity Today and The Atlantic.

 

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Episode Transcript:

Dan: Rachael, John Lewis used this lovely phrase, and I think it is a phrase that well begins our conversation with a remarkable woman. And that is “good trouble”, good trouble. So many of us, I will speak for myself, have created a lot of trouble. And I’m not sure that has just been good, but when you get the chance to be with someone who has created good, good gospel, glory trouble, it’s a great honor. And so Aimee Byrd, we welcome you to the podcast. I’ll say a few more words about you, but nonetheless, this is one of those incredible honors to have you join us.

Aimee: Wow. The honor is mine really to be on this podcast and to talk with both of you, Rachael and Dan, thanks for having me on.

Dan: You are so welcome, and again, folks can see without any question, you are a remarkable author podcaster, I think a brilliant theologian. And your books have invited, I believe, the believing community to address levels of harm, levels of hope. You are one of those who has the ability to step into naming and facing death, but with a deep to the bone resurrection hope that allows for honesty to actually move the heart into hope. So with all that, let me just say, we’re talking about your newest book, Saving Face: Finding Myself, God and One Another Outside a Defaced Church. That alone, I mean, come on. The title alone is enough to go, oh, what absolute glory. So if you let me describe the book for me and see if it at all rings true. This is a theological memoir. Would you begin with that?

Aimee: Sure. Yeah. It’s such a combination of genres, so it’s interesting to hear. Yeah.

Dan: So to me it’s a theological memoir of losing in some sense, your face, your heart and hope amidst spiritual abuse, but yet entering what all of us have to enter if we really want to grow. And that is the valley, the shadow of death where only our truest face can be found. Does that at all..?

Aimee: Yeah, I love that. I should have gotten you to write on the back cover the summary.

Dan: Well just to step in to then this incredible invitation to the importance of our face and the face of God. Take us into what prompted the writing.

Aimee: So I was inspired I think by two different readings. One is my favorite novel, which is C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. And boy, I would’ve loved to had that title, but this is the retelling of Cupid and Psyche through Psyche’s, sister, Orual and C.S. Lewis just brilliantly writes in first person narrative as a woman in this book. That right there blew my mind like this old white guy is really pulling it off. But in this story, Orual is writing her complaint against the gods and she’s so angry at the gods for the conditions of her life and she believes that she knows what love is, she knows what goodness is and righteousness and she’s doing and becoming these things. And at the end of her life, and she becomes the queen of Glome, and she’s a wonderful ruler. At the end of her life, she has this vision and she is before the gods and her whole life, she wore a veil to cover her ugliness and it kind of gave her more power. And now she is stripped naked before the Gods veil stripped off everything and she’s got her book of complaints and they tell her, what is your complaint? And so finally she is able to read her complaints and she notices that the book is smaller than she thought it was. And she opens it up and the writing kind of looks like squibble in a way, but she’s like, no, this is it. I’m going to read it. And as she’s reading, she realizes she’s going on and on and on, that she’s saying the same thing over and over and over again. And so the gods interrupt her and say, do you have your answer? And she did. And she realized all this time, unless you can really dig out what it is that’s deep inside your gut of who you are, how can you be face to face before the gods and expect answers from them until you have a face? So this whole time she’s been building a persona of what she thought goodness was and who she thought she was and who she thought God was supposed to be even. And man, I can really resonate. I can really resonate with that. So that stuck with me. I read that in my early twenties and I reread it again in my mid-forties and got so much more out of it. But then at that time as I was rereading it, I was also reading Emmanuel Levinas and I mean the man blew my mind. I’m such an existential thinker anyway, and so he’s using this face as a metaphor and he talks about getting to the naked face, getting behind our countenance and how this is really an awakening by God to love somebody else. So when I get to your naked face, I could completely liquidate you because you’re vulnerable there. And so he says behind that is the commandment, thou shalt not kill. And he says that God descends in the face of the other. And it brings out my own otherness and my own strangeness, and I have this awakening then to bless you. To join God in blessing you really, is what that is. And so the blessing is to see the act of God in this awakening to love. So I’m kind of combining these thoughts together in this theological memoir.

Dan: Well, the glory of what you have invited us to, just to say I’ve been very fond of Levinas for about…

Aimee: Really? Awesome.

Dan: …about 25, 30 years. So I’ve read a great deal. So when I saw the book itself, when I saw and I’m like, this would be so good if there was an intersection with Till We Have Faces and Levinas, because I have never seen a believing heart engage those two realities. This was one of those thrills of going…

Aimee: I’m so glad to hear that because when I discovered Levinas and I think I discovered him through a footnote of another book and it was some line, and I thought, that’s fascinating. And so then I read, Is It Righteous To Be? And I mean I was like, I got to think about this and unpack it for a long time.

Dan: Okay, we’re not going to geek out too far, but if you ever ever want to read one of the dearest reflections on a life, it’s Derrida, who reflects on Levina’s life as his funeral, and it is one of the holy writings, people don’t generally think of Derrida, if you even know the name, as one that would be one who would weep over the life of another. But Levinas had that kind of power because what he brought in the interplay is that we are response-able for every face, not responsible in the sense of false loyalty or false connection, but a kind if we take in the face of the other, we have taken in the face of God. If we take in the face of God without that sense of response, a kind ability to honor the raw vulnerability, but also the incredible beauty of a human face. So at least what I want to begin with is that question of what have you learned through this and what prompted, because as I said at the beginning, spiritual abuse is a really central category for this. I would love for you to put words to the intersection of spiritual abuse and what you’ve discovered about your own face.

Aimee: I had to learn so much when I went through spiritual abuse because I just didn’t have the vocabulary, really. And I thought that logically I can define some things as really dead wrong and un-Christian, but I didn’t understand the nature of trauma and how the body really does hold onto that. And so it takes years to unpack. But I educated myself a lot in that process and it’s very easy to when going through something utterly evil really to say, okay, these are the bad guys. I’m the victim here and this is horrible. But really that process that you’re talking about, Dan, there was a unlearning, not just what I learned. There was a lot that I had to unlearn. And I think that face metaphor works so well for that because I too had to ask, I had to turn it on myself and say, what attracted me to this denomination? What was I getting out of this? Why did I have such joy before in this church and how did I not see the underpins? How did I not see what was going on behind the curtains all this time? I thought I was a discerning person. And so trying to go through the work of reform and things like that, a therapist who specialized in spiritual abuse asked me, Aimee, why do you think you need to be a missionary in your own church? That was such a clarifying question. Like, oh yeah, we shouldn’t have to be missionaries in church. The churches shouldn’t be the mission field, and what am I doing here? And so I had to turn the questions onto myself, and that’s when I saw I had been building a face. I was in this denomination because I was seeking certainty and this facade of the theological elite. I wanted that. I wanted that certainty about God. My husband and I both come from divorced homes. I wanted to do it right. I wanted to have a good marriage and raise our children in the right church and be the good version of me. And so I had this false security and all those things and false security even in the more doctrine that you know and the more precise that you can be with it, the closer you might be to God. So there was a lot of unlearning, I would say, which I believe is such a huge part of repentance. And so finding my face, this is my journey of finding my face that I’m writing about in this book.

Rachael: Well, there was a line that caught me when you’re talking about discovering the death of the other. I mean, first of all, I just want to say I just was so captivated by you from the very start of the book as you brought this little girl who is very existential, even the way she’s looking in the mirror, her haircut, her warring desires to belong, but also to be set apart. And just the radical curiosity, I would say that sense of I thought, oh, I think we would’ve been good playmates if we had known each other then, because I also know that would’ve made you a very strange little person in the midst of other peers. But there’s a line where you say, you are talking about so much, but you have this line, we need more than reform. We need resurrection. And I really feel like in so many ways, that’s the courage and honesty that you bring to this book with a lot of vulnerability. Even what you just named that in some ways the healing journey certainly invited you to take a deeper look at the systems, the processes and the people and the ideologies that you were drawn to and you were in the midst of. But then that invitation to go even deeper as to why, what are the stories here? And you do it with an honesty but not a cruelty. And I think for so many people that turn can actually be so contemptuous towards our own face, right? Wow, this is my fault. Or I’m so stupid, I’m so foolish, I should have been smarter. How come I didn’t see this? And not that you didn’t have those moments, but the invitation to actually see the different dimensions of the face and the stories that it tells and the stories that our faces hold. I’m just deeply grateful for your courage, but also your curiosity.

Aimee: Well, I feel like I learned a lot from Dan and from others like Adam Young, his new book that’s out, I think you guys interviewed him too, this ability to be curious. I think I’m learning to go back and retell your stories to look at your memories, and that’s how we find our face, right? Because our faces hold our secrets and to go back to those memories and do some story work there, I kind of start each chapter with that and I’ve learned to try to be kind to that person, that 14-year-old Aimee who was self-righteous and angry. What was there that we need to bless about her and be angry with her and learn too.

Dan: Again, the model of being able to hold the heartache, but with honor and to honor not just your own story, but the depths of, in this case you talk about your mom, you talk about your grandmother, and those felt like especially toward middle end of the book, new revelation, a new kind of, I’m seeing things… So again, walk us into what you’ve seen and how that plays out in the context of coming to see your own face differently.

Aimee: Yeah, I mean, trauma has a way of, the word trigger is so overused, but it does, it triggers something past traumas that I’ve gone through in my life. And so that memory that I talk about where I’m looking out the window, waiting for my mom to come home while at the same time feeling her leaving us and losing her attunement and those kind of things, I thought about that memory a lot. That’s a memory that has affected me early in my marriage when my husband was maybe 20 minutes late and I’m looking out the window. Those same feelings came up and I had to do some work there. But after going through this spiritual abuse and the trauma from that, I really got deeper into that memory. I thought I did the work before, but I realized there’s a lot more here and even work I’m still doing with the abandonment feeling of maybe feeling abandoned by God through this spiritual abuse and looking for a church community. So I felt like journaling through these memories was so helpful and healing for me, but I really wanted to share them with my parents. I’m a writer, I guess this is a weird way of doing it, but I had them reading my manuscript as I was writing it, and I really wanted to model what that looks like to do that kind of work for the reader, because I know I have a lot of readers who’ve been through a lot, but everybody has, right? We all go through this. So I wanted to really show it. I think after being called things publicly and online, the great whore of Babylon, you just have a little less care about what people think about you anymore. So I can be a little more vulnerable maybe…

Dan: Again, if it weren’t so evil, there’d be something that’s just beyond the word ridiculous to… it’s absurd, almost to a point of going, look, I would trust Balaam’s ass more than the people who brought those levels of condemnation. So in the engagement, I think what I found myself doing, looking particularly at the relationship with your grandmother, she was not an easy human being to engage. And yet the capturing, and I’m telling your story, so it’s just not the smartest thing in the world I’ve ever done. But when you come to that moment where she blesses you, I would love for you to tell a portion of that story.

Aimee: Well, you’re never expecting these things. And I always felt like grandma loved me to pieces, but she also I think wanted me to take different directions in my career.

Dan: Dental hygienist, for example,

Aimee: Dental hygienist was suggested many times and she had a way of comparing you with your cousins and things like that. And she even was the one who gave me a self-conscious image about my body because she told me that if I’m not careful, I’m going to look like these other Reinhardts that are really overweight. And I just remember being in the sixth grade afraid to put my thighs fully on the chair because that makes them look bigger because grandma’s voice in my head. So there is conflicting relationship there. And this was back in 2016 when she was dying, and I’m visiting her often at the nursing home, and she was still very mentally clear, and as I was leaving, I gave her a kiss goodbye, and she just kind of sat up and said, Aimee, that kind of scary sound of your name, they might be in trouble. And I turned around and I’m like, yeah. And she’s like, you keep writing. Don’t you ever let them stop you from writing. And I just thought, what in the world, grandma? First of all, to me it was an affirmation that she accepted what I’m doing and that I should do it. But that was before all this happened, and it was at a time where everything was going pretty okay. So I didn’t… later I looked at that as a deathbed benediction. That’s true. That she may have had some sort of clarity to speak to me then when I didn’t want to write anymore, when they were trying to make me stop writing in very serious ways and it would be easier just to not. So those words ended up holding a lot of power for me.

Dan: The reality that she was part of marring your face, but also part of calling your face into that bare raw reality, yet also prophetically indeed speaking, I think on behalf of God of don’t you dare let them take your voice away so she knew something about your capacity to create good trouble.

Aimee: Yeah, I mean, I guess it didn’t just happen that one time, but I caused good trouble in the family sometimes, as well.

Rachael: Yeah, I mean, I think I just keep going back to every time we get close to mentioning just some of what you suffered and how confusing and humiliating it is, what we actually are offering someone is an invitation to have a more true face, to come closer to bearing the face of God when we’re actually offering them beauty, but in a way that exposes and if we’ve yet to have an experience where that exposure brings violence, it is so jarring and unexpected and unanticipated, and you talk about how we need bare faced leaders and that it takes a lot of bravery and emotional and spiritual maturity. And I just am grateful for your grandmother, that those words… because I know in my own story what it is to face the violence. And you put words to this in a dream sequence around of the vipers, really right, of the demonic forces behind the human entities saying, shut up. Don’t actually testify to the resurrection because this works better when people are convinced that the power and control of reform is doing the work of the gospel. And so I just am sitting with this kind of, again, back to a kind of awe that you’ve brought your face to us in such a beautiful way, such a clear way when it has borne such harm that is also a collective harm right against the faces of women, the faces of really any oppressed people calling those with power to actually live out who God has called them to be. And it is my hope that you’ve had some experiences of people who respond to that invitation. I mean you’ve responded to it, but others who have responded in a way that’s maybe helped create some new neural pathways in your healing process.

Aimee: Well, I mean it really is an invitation to death in a lot of ways, isn’t it? I love that verse in John about, and it’s Jesus speaking. Unless you’re like this grain of wheat that falls to the earth and dies, there is no life in you, but if it dies, you bear much fruit. And I kind of in my last book, The Hope in Our Scars talk about that verse a lot and how that brings us down to the underground where Jesus is, that is where he is. It’s so scary because it’s such a liminal space to fall down like that. To die to these things that were so valuable to you and to die to the investment of what you thought were making good investments.

Rachael: Absolutely.

Aimee: To your whole idea about what you’ve been chasing and that it’s a hustle and it’s just striving to be in my late forties and to admit that that’s a death right there. But to have gone through what I went through, one of the biggest horrors that was so clear was to see the complete lack of spiritual maturity and emotional maturity in these leaders. I have a lot of unbelieving friends who behave much more godly.

Rachael: That’s right.

Aimee: And so the lack of Christ to be in a presbytery meeting, which is like a governmental regional church meeting, and to see pastors parading around as if they’re lawyers and not good lawyers and just no Christ there to see the book of church order being parsed and to protect harmful power while harming me who’s sitting right there. I don’t even have a name. So when my husband and I got in the car after that and we shut the car doors, it was just like we just escaped darkness. We were in a presbytery meeting.

Dan: It’s heartbreaking. A portion of what you write, if I can read it, “what controversial teaching has led me losing a job, losing friends and spiritual abuse by church authorities. Was it writing about how women should be invested in and have agency as disciples, as sisters in God’s church? Or about how men and women should treat one another, not as possible affairs, but as unique human beings whom we are responsible to help promote in holiness? I was called ungodly, satanic, Jezebel, and many other lovelies.” Look, it’s so heartbreaking. And when you added the phrase “and many other lovelies,” look, I was having a small lovely glass of tea and my book has been stained. I just spit it out because it’s so horrible what you describe that even if what you’re righting is controversial or wrong to be treated with a level of violence and cruelty and contempt, and yet the playfulness, that’s what I was trying to capture with regard to you walk into death, but you believe in the resurrection and therefore there can be no minimization of death, no minimization of the horror of the spiritual abuse. But there is something that rose within you that allows you a kind of humor, humility, a capacity to laugh, not mock, but laugh. And so that question of, it’s a terrible question, how did you become so mature in the face of your own self righteousness?

Aimee: I think it is the humiliation of what I went through. I had to come to… am I going to fight for my own virtue here? Am I going to sink to their level? I needed to ask myself what’s real and what really matters. And even something like a reputation I had at the time when this was happening in 2020, my youngest was still in high school, and my daughters were young adults, and they’re seeing. Cause it’s so public, the harassment was so public on Twitter and stuff. And they’re seeing this horrible stuff being said about their mother by pastors, what does that do to their spiritual life? And so everything that I had valued and the things that attracted me there had fallen completely apart. And it was very humiliating. I mean, I remember praying to God thinking, it’s good for me to want a good reputation. That’s a good thing, but it’s not the most important thing. And I had to really sit down and ask myself what matters? And that puts you on the underground. And the laughing… well, for one thing, I just love to laugh, but I think that it does reveal hope because laughter reveals, I think Dallas Willard says that the incongruencies in life makes us laugh. And so that means that there’s something true and lovely that is being missed here. There’s a huge incongruency in that presbytery meeting between loveliness and beauty and what was going on in there. And yeah, the laughter reveals the hope in some ways.

Dan: The trajectory of what you write is that you are really a very bright, very gifted and very good girl through much of your life. In other words, there wouldn’t be obvious blemishes. And yet through this process, you began looking at your own, again, broad words, self-righteousness, demand for others to be able to see how good you began to see how deeply blemished your face is. But somehow in that transition from a good face to a blemished face, you’ve come to an even greater sense of the beauty of your face. Is that well said?

Aimee: Sure. Yeah. I mean, there’s a sense to where the fractures that you find in your face in the holes to all the things that you’ve thought about yourself, about God, about goodness, they’re invitations, then. They’re invitations. And I end the book and Saving Face, getting to the maturing face. And I quote from Anne Lamont and her husband who talks about these profound words, I don’t know. And I loved that so much because I was on such a search for knowledge and precision, and it all fell apart, and now I’m relearning so much. But that’s because God is God. And so the more you learn and unlearn, the more you see, you just don’t know. You don’t know. And it’s a posture then it’s a posture of wonder and curiosity and hope because you get to be suppressed.

Dan: Which means you’ve come to welcome your own face in new ways. And I’m just curious what that welcoming has felt like. You’re not just a repentant good girl, but in seeing what you’ve seen, it’s as if you’ve been invited to invite us all back to a different table and to a different way of engaging in so many ways the banquet of God.

Aimee: Yeah, I mean, sometimes that face feels lonely because I think a lot of people don’t want to get to that nakedness. So many don’t. In some ways, it’s been very dissatisfying, going to church, looking for raw community, a place where we bring our stories, a place where during the prayer requests we’re not only talking about health concerns. In some ways it can be really lonely. In some ways it makes me think, am I too much? I’m always feeling that, but in another way, it’s like, I don’t care. I will say things I wouldn’t say before. I value good trouble now, where before I was tiptoeing around the borders and trying so hard to not stir anything up, but to say, does anybody see this?

Rachael: Which isn’t that ironic, is actually what we’re invited to in a baptism, to kind of lose that slavery to death, to the fear of death, to the fear of exile and having more freedom to bring that resurrection presence that defiantly playful and powerful and comforting, nurturing all the things. I didn’t mean to cut you off, I just…

Aimee: No, no, no, thank you. Yeah, that’s exactly right. I feel like there’s a little bit of a rebelliousness in it, and I have to kind of look back and ask God and really struggle there, but because I do feel less, I don’t want to have that self-righteousness, and it keeps trying to come back.

Rachael: That’s a tricky one. That’s a real tricky one.

Aimee: Yeah. It makes you such a judgmental person too.

Rachael: Well, and I think that’s why I love the face as a metaphor, right? Because self-righteousness is so defacing of others. It’s such a, and I’m just speaking as one who will be in recovery from self-righteousness from the rest of eternity, just that desire to deface another so that you don’t have to step into the vulnerable place.

Aimee: Yeah. But I feel like back to what you’re saying with the defacing and the resurrection part, I was in a church culture that was all about reform. It was all about how the church is reformed and is continuously being called to reform. And it sounds so fabulous to reform back to the word of God and the early church, but when I saw how bad the system of it all is, I realized, yeah, reform ain’t going to cut it. There needs to be death in so many things. And one is really how we think about power, how we think about agency, how we think about authority. And I’m still thinking about all those things.

Rachael: Well, and in some ways it’s like we’re in an apocalyptic as far as unveiling of the defaced church, it’s just not hard to look around right now and say, oh, this caricature of whatever big portions of the church in the United States have felt drawn to this massive abuse of power, the mockery, the cruelty, which in some ways is so what you experienced in that presbytery meeting, it was so mocking, it was so belittling, it was so dehumanizing. And we see that playing out in these larger ways. And I just keep coming back to your invitation to the underground in the sense that it’s such a paradox and mystery of the gospel that there’s something about this place where we are liberated to a more true self, which therefore means we actually receive comfort, like a true comfort, the comfort we need that we’ve been avoiding or afraid of, or not even just our own coping. And then that capacity to bring the glory of God to others who needs someone who has that maturity to say, I’ll delight in you and I’ll also weep with you where both things exist at the same time. And that Yeah, absolutely. That doesn’t come without a kind of death,

Aimee: Even a death of what I thought was so important was morality. Obviously morality is important, but we’ve made Christianity such a moral matter that we’ve lost the mystical matter that it is. And we are spiritual people. Our faith is a spirituality. We believe that the Holy Spirit indwells God’s people. And so what you’re talking about with the facing… Your face, I should be looking for Christ in your face, then I’m participating with God and his kindness and love towards you. And that is an awakening that Lavinas talks about and what a blessing that is because then we make something else. But Christ is in that. There’s something spiritual happening there. And even the whole field of interpersonal neurobiology and how our minds match and map and all these things, how fascinating is all of that. And so we can’t just reduce it to this false righteousness and moral matter where if doing these things, then I’m ascending the ladder and becoming a more spiritual person where Christ models so much that you got to go down the ladder.

Dan: Well, and the Greek word prosopon upon which translates as face is also where we get the word presence. So you’re talking about the presence of the living God who is a face within you and your face is daily having to engage the face of God in you. If the spirit of God through Jesus lives within you, then that reality of you’re in a face-to-face relationship with God, we will not see the face of the Father, but we have seen the face of the Father. So you’ve got something of that playful paradox. So when, if we can geek out just for another moment, I’m so sorry. So one of Levinas’s, most shall we say, controversial categories, was that we bear response-ability for the face of the other, which is why we tend not to want to look at a homeless person. We don’t want to bear the weight of their existence. What you’re just asking for a dollar to use it for something toxic, I’m not responsible for you. So almost all of our life, culturally, socially, systemically is built on, I don’t have responsibility for your face. And so what you’re putting words to is that as Levinas would say, is that the face is the place of the word of God. When we engage the face of God in the face of the other. Therefore, as we are responsible for how we live before God, we are equally, if not more so response-able for how we live in the face of the other. And your face, which was so good, and then, so broken, and now so even more so beautiful. What do you find people doing with your face as you continue to write, teach, podcast? In other words, your good trouble. How has your face of, shall we say, been engaged in the last couple years?

Aimee: Well, in my old circles, even those who knew how horrible it was, but decided to stay with the comforts of their vocations and things, they can’t look at my face. I’m the homeless person, they can’t. Some of them tried to give me another face to wear their version of the story that makes them the heroes. And if I refuse that face, and you have to look at this face.

Rachael: That’s right.

Aimee: So like I said, it is a little lonely. I’ve had to find new community. And in some ways that’s been tumultuous because… you’re healing, you’re vulnerable, you’re traumatized. So there are guards that I put up when I go to church and I can’t go to the potluck, I can’t go to the, whatever these programs are, they all seem like such a veneer. I need a personal invitation out to coffee or beer or lunch or something like that to really get to know personally somebody in the church where I’m finding everything is these program invitations, things I used to do like crazy and serve on and like crazy repulse me a little bit now. So it is harder in a lot of ways, but then I do feel compelled just with what you’re saying, Dan, about Levinas. And theology begins in the face of the neighbor. We long, long to see the face of God in Jesus Christ and that beatific vision looking at us and delighting in us. And I find that so much too. When I read the Song of Songs, I write a lot about song and here is the metaphor, the allegory of the incarnate Christ, talking to the bride, his church, his people, and he’s calling her out of the cleft of the rock and he says, let me see your face. Let me hear your voice because your face is lovely and your voice is sweet. And man, I tell myself those words from God a lot because that recalibrates me. But I also think then about that great benediction that I grew up with at the end of the service, the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord’s face…

Dan: Shine upon you.

Aimee: That’s the blessing, right? We’re longing for that. But I’m finally realizing that we’re not just being sent out one day. One day, the Lord’s face will shine upon us and we look forward to that great promise, but that it’s actually a call to vocation to us that when we bless another face, that we are joining in with the Lord’s face shining upon them. And so that invigorates me, and I think that keeps me going in a lot of ways because there’s just beauty and power in that and true goodness, what an invitation, but also what a responsibility too.

Rachael: It makes me think when you take that and you think about things like diversity, equity and inclusion, that stories hold particular personal faces and they hold layers of collective story. And part of that call is to honor the stories that faces hold. Like I’m married to someone who’s Taiwanese American. His face holds very different stories than my face holds, both in our very personal familial stories, but the ways in which society, puts, tries to give us a face or responds to our face. And I think to me that’s some of my greatest heartache and such disillusionment with the defaced church is that the bride has forgotten that it holds a multitude of faces. And that is very much part of being the Imago Dei. There’s so beautiful about our diversity and what it will mean someday when the fullness of God has come to completion, that we will still bear the distinctives of our face as the very representation of God’s image and God’s beauty and God’s glory. So when I see these Venezuelans being kidnapped and sent to a concentration camp that we’re calling a prison that we’re paying for, and their heads are being shaved, they’re being put in the same outfit, they’re being made to be defaced so that we can put on them a story that justifies that kind of violence. And that’s in many ways what I see happen to you in this particular context. And I think it is what our young people are watching and going, who is God? And I am grateful that the Spirit of God does not cease to bring God’s grace even in the midst of our mess, even in the midst of our failure to see the face of God in the other and therefore to see it in ourselves. And I just feel like so much of even what I’m saying is what you bring to us in this book. Thank you. And I agree with Dan. It is a theological memoir. I also want to say it’s a deeply biblical memoir, and I’m just really grateful and I hope that people check it out, spend time with it, are drawn to look in the mirror and to seek safe enough people. Yeah. I think I just want to say to you, Aimee, that place of trauma and trying to connect mercy and power to you, because it is, I hear and see that your hope and your longing has… like you’re leaning in to the risk. And I also just hold such compassion for the places that it reminds you of what you’ve lost and what it costs and how scary it is to risk again and not have that certainty.

Dan: And we come alongside your grandmother and we say, Aimee, don’t let them keep you from writing.

Aimee: Thank you so much. That’s so encouraging to hear.

Dan: Thank you.