In Every Face I See

One thing God has really put on my heart is to try to see Him in each person I see. It's something I'm not very good at. I pass by a lot of people each day. I forget a lot of faces and I notice the clothes, the styles, the bodies, and the swagger. I've come to notice lots of interesting clothes, and the styles can sure catch my eye. I've even come to see the attitudes and the personalities people reflect in their walk. It can be fascinating just to discern as much as you can from something as simple as a stranger's walk.

What I haven't learned to do well is see their walk with God as they pass me by. I don't beat myself up over it. It's not a normal thing to do. It would be so presumptuous of me to sit on a bus and spiritually analyze someone I've never met. Maybe it's that fear that I'd be judging them that stops me. I never want to judge. Somehow I've connected in my head the idea that trying to look at people in a spiritual light is some form a prejudice.

No doubt that doubt and that risk persists even with the best of intentions. I barely have a clear view of my own spirituality, let alone trying to see it in those that pass me by.

But it's different somehow. I don't feel this calling is to spiritually gauge people so to speak.

It's a call to see that at their core they are spiritual people. It's a call to recognize that God knows that person, whether as an intimate father or a father longing after His distant child. God wants me to recognize that. To Him they matter just as much as me. He wants me to see they are living, with all the pains, joys, and complications that living entails. He wants me to see that they are dying, whether it be just a fading of time or a starving for lack of Him.

It makes me think of an oddly appropriate analogy. Some movie was done in clay animation, but a few shots were digitally created. Thing was, they need to digitally add the fingerprints to the computer models so they looked exactly like the clay models. Without that tiny detail, the computer images just were not convincing. People could tell they were not clay.

If I don't see God's fingerprints on each person I see I don't truly see them. Those images I have of each person I've randomly passed is incomplete without them. I've grown so accustomed to just walking by, never thinking twice, but never noticing the little details that make each person real.

That's just it. They're not real without Him. If I don't look at each person with my heart fully acknowledging God's presence in their lives, I look right through them. It would be judgmental of me not to see that.