Confession time again... I’m drawn to books by their covers. Artwork, title, font, number of pages are all things that attract me. But, exactly how much do these surface features really say about the heart of a book? The author’s voice?
The message inside?
Certainly a cover and its trimmings can provide a glimpse into what a book may or may not be about, but would I even pick up the book to flip through if I wasn’t first drawn to its cover?
Maybe.
Likely not.
In my musings, I have come to the conclusion that book covers are very much like the skin we live in as humans. The packaging, if you will.
The first things we notice about each other are all exterior features. Face, hair, clothes, body, teeth. Our packaging.
Our cover.
It is these surface characteristics that first serve to either attract us or repel us from each other.
If we like what we see, we make the effort to study the person closer, dig a little deeper, get to know them better. At the other end, if we don’t like what we see, we tend to move on with scarcely a backward glance.
Sad, but true.
It makes me wonder how many fascinating stories I’ve missed because I didn’t like a cover.
It makes me wonder how many conversations, or even friendships, I’ve missed because I didn’t like a cover.
I was reminded of a book I read several years ago by the now deceased memoirist, Lucy Grealy, detailing the impact of jaw cancer on her childhood and adolescence.
In Autobiography of a Face, Lucy wrote about how facial disfigurement impacted every single aspect of her life. Inside and out. I copied the following quote into my book journal...
“But for me, dressing as if I didn’t care was an attempt not to care, to show the world I wasn’t concerned with what it thought of my face. In my carefully orchestrated shabbiness, I was hoping to beat the world to the finish line by showing that I already knew I was ugly. Still, all the while, I was secretly hoping that in the process some potential lover might accidentally notice I was wearing my private but beautiful heart on my stained and fraying sleeve.”
What Lucy said impacts me today just as it did years ago. I hurt for her and feel her pain.
I can never know what is going on in someone else’s life if I don’t chose to look beneath the surface and get beyond their cover.
One final thought that brings a smile to my face and a surge of thankfulness to my heart. In the Biblical account of the prophet Samuel anointing David, king of Israel, it says,
But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7
It comes down to this...If God, the maker of all, looks beyond the cover – shouldn’t we?
Reading on...
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