Bags Under the Eyes: A Weary New Emoji

How weary are you this week? Are you getting pushed around by systems too complicated to understand and too big to fight?

Last year Donald Trump was elected President of the United States for promising he could successfully push back against these systems. Many weary voters liked his agenda: downsize the federal government, pressure Big Pharma to lower its prices, cancel the woke agenda, improve the balance of international trade, reduce international freeloading on American military expenditure.

The high-speed changes President Trump has under way are not relieving our weariness, at least not yet. Instead they are calling us all to sprint to keep up. The instability adds anxiety to our weariness, and the result is captured—where else?—in a new emoji included in Apple’s iOS 18.4, released March 31st.

Thank you Grace Snelling and Fast Company for flagging this new emoji as a “sign of the times,” sad as it is. The emoji depicts “a beleaguered little guy with drooping lids, dark circles, lowered eyebrows, and a mouth represented by a single straight line. It has the kind of resigned expression of someone who’s well past their limit, but is still soldiering on.” https://www.fastcompany.com/91309448/new-emojis-face-with-bags-under-eyes-ios-184

The ”Face With Bags Under Eyes” emoji is the face of a person longing for freedom but stuck in place by heavy layers of unpleasant reality. The face illustrates the problem that gets solved in SYNC’s Freedom Season—the problem of feeling trapped in a lousy situation.

Many centuries ago this emoji would have resonated perfectly with the crowds who hailed Jesus as he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (the day when SYNC’s Freedom Season begins). Those crowds had bags under their eyes, figuratively speaking.

They were ordinary Jewish citizens sick to death of being “beleaguered little guys” under the thumb of the Roman Empire, not to mention the thumbs of their own religious establishment. They wanted a Messiah to bring them freedom, and they called on Jesus, a descendant of King David who had built a nationwide popular following, to be their man.

Jesus brought their freedom--not by overthrowing their oppressors--by taking on their weariness. On the cross he may have had bags under his eyes because he had been up all night praying and sweating blood before his arrest. But the bags would not have been noticeable because of the bruises, swelling, and cuts from the pre-execution beating he endured.

Here is the glorious ancient truth written by Isaiah hundreds of years before Jesus’s trauma: “By his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53.5). The bottom line is that Jesus frees us from our weariness and entrapment without overthrowing our oppressors. He begins the change process by changing us, not our circumstances.

Jesus liberates us from being dominated by our circumstances. This is not just positive thinking or resilience. Having given up his freedom to win ours, Jesus was freed from the grave. He reentered the world of the living to show his resurrection power, and he sent his Spirit into his followers to liberate us from the hopeless fatigue of the face-with-bags emoji.

“Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air” (Romans 8.1-2, The Message).”

I do have to disagree with Grace Snelling on one point. She says of the emoji, “This is all of us.” But it doesn’t have to be. This is all those who are stuck in the present, dominated by a lousy situation. In Jesus the Messiah, we become “People of the Future” (POTF), free to move with him toward our destiny and purpose.

To tap into more of the freedom and energy of Jesus, see the Freedom Season Tool Kit. For more on People of the Future, see “In SYNC with the Future,” the home page at www.SYNCx.org. Use that emoji only to represent the person you used to be.