Smiling Masks

Mary’s Monday Musings to Quilt Encouragement
Smiling Masks

“What a great mask! We can see your smile.” I always hear these remarks when I wear a mask with a window of flexible see-through plastic covering my mouth. I love that I can express my delight in seeing someone by smiling at them as well as with my words. I love that people can see my smile when I wear it.

“Where did you find it?” always follows. I found it on the internet by looking up, “A mask that shows a person’s smile.” A large number of variously styled masks popped up with a variety of prices.

Smiles are one of the things we miss a lot in this pandemic. The absence of smiles, hugs, and hand-shakes leave great holes in our ability to express our love, acceptance and welcome to others. These lacks contribute to the sense of isolation. One way to compensate is with words to speak of our feelings out loud. Pantomiming a hug doesn’t leave a warm fuzzy feeling, but it does reassure someone that you would hug them if it were safe. When the pantomime is returned, we can assume it would be received without discomfort and fear if we could. We need to enlarge our vocabulary to express caring, and we need to overcome any hesitancy we might have to put our feelings into words. We need to say them out loud. Look up the word, ‘love’, in a thesaurus to find other words. Several years ago, a friend used a group of words written in bold on cards. The man flipped the cards by hand to express affection, welcome, approval, and encouragement to those he met.

Best of all, we can continue to pray for the defeat of Covid 19 and for God’s help to discover a variety of ways to communicate affirmation. People long to hear approval. Ask God how to best communicate Christian love in this day of Covid.