How important is a nice smile?

That may depend on where you live. In almost any culture, a sincere smile is a good thing. It is friendly. It shows good favor. (See Job 29:24.) But too much smiling isn’t always welcome.

The Chinese think that a person who smiles all the time is foolish or silly. In Germany, a constant smile seems fake. A Russian may suspect a smiling stranger of being up to some mischief.

But Americans put a very high value on the smile. It’s rare to see any public figure without perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth, widely displayed. People spend many thousands of dollars trying to get those perfect teeth.

Teeth serve a necessary practical purpose. They let us eat our food! Everyone needs that! So keeping teeth healthy is important. But beyond that, the American culture also wants to see every tooth present in every smile. And that can sometimes create new problems.

If a person is missing a tooth and that shows when he or she smiles, then often that person feels less confident than others. That lack of confidence is called “low self-esteem.” A person with low self-esteem might think he is worth less than others. He may feel judged for how he looks. That makes it hard to make friends sometimes. It makes it hard to ask for a new job. The same is sometimes true for very crooked teeth. Not only is it harder to eat when teeth don’t line up right. It can also make people worry about what they look like.

It is good when dentists fix missing teeth. It is good to get teeth lined up the way they work best. Those things can make people’s lives better. But Jesus loves us no matter what we look like. That’s always true, and it’s the best reason to smile.