As I indicated in my post of 3/26/12 ("Show Me Your Eyes"), the eyes are a window to one's soul. When we first converse with a stranger, we look into their eyes, and in them we can often get a feel for the choices they've made. A few days ago I had an experience confirming this.
It happened on a flight from Dallas to Phoenix. I had a window seat, and one of the last passengers to board was a young woman whom I would guess was in her twenties. She chose the seat next to me. She was very tan with bleached blond hair, and she wore very skimpy clothing and expensive jewelry.
I had my noise-cancelling headphones on, so when she wanted to converse she did so with the fellow in the aisle seat. The headphones do an excellent job filtering out engine noise. However, even with them on I can still hear conversations going on around me, so I easily overheard her telling the fellow next to her all the reasons why she liked Dallas much better than Phoenix. She said she had lived for awhile in Phoenix, but there was nothing about it that she liked. On the other hand, she said she loved Dallas because Dallas was "where the money is," and in her line of work that's what it was all about. When he asked her what kind of work she did, her voice became hushed, so I didn't hear the response.
Later, during a stopover in Albuquerque, she and I exchanged a few comments, and that was the only opportunity I had to look into her eyes. I observed that while she had the body of a twenty-something, her eyes seemed much older, as if they'd seen much of life that was rough and unseemly. We didn't visit very long after that because she decided to move to a seat that was closer to the overhead bin where she'd stowed her carry-on bag.
After she left, the fellow with whom she'd been conversing turned to me and, rolling his eyes, asked if I'd overheard her response when he asked what kind of work she did. I said no. He said she told him she's in the "entertainment" industry (wink wink) . . . obviously referring to something akin to prostitution. I immediately recalled that world-weary look in her eyes . . . and it was then that I recalled remarks from a talk by James E. Faust in which he recounted comments made by the famous news commentator, Paul Harvey, following a visit to the BYU campus.
Of all the things Mr. Harvey saw during his visit, what impressed him most were the looks on the faces of the students. He observed: "Each . . . young face mirrored a sort of . . . sublime assurance." He went on to say there was a clear difference between what he saw in the faces of BYU students as opposed to faces of others he'd seen. He said that the eyes many, like the eyes of this young lady, reflect unwise choices, choices that do not reflect righteous standards of behavior: "These days many young eyes are prematurely old from countless compromises with conscience."
That was a perfect description of what I'd seen as I looked into that young lady's eyes: the look of one who had made countless compromises with conscience. I thought of her parents, wondering if they knew how she made her living. And then I thought about something else I'd overheard when she was talking with that fellow. When he tried to convince her that winters in Phoenix were milder than those in Dallas, she said that didn't matter -- that she didn't mind the cold. She was used to it because she'd grown up in Utah.
I wondered if somewhere in Utah there was a father and a mother praying for a daughter to stop compromising with her conscience. And I prayed for her.
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