On Sunday, God showed me something I’d somehow lived forty-six years without ever noticing. Not because it had been hidden. Simply because I’d never noticed it.

During worship, completely lost in the moment, the room around me disappeared in the way it sometimes does when nothing else matters except the One you’re there for. It was then that a picture came to me. There was nothing unusual about the scene. The congregation was worshipping as they always do. Some people had their hands raised. Others stood quietly with their faces turned towards heaven. A few knelt where they were. It was a scene I’ve seen hundreds of times before. Then my attention settled on their faces. Not who they were. Not what they were feeling. Just the faces.

If you begin at the bridge of the nose and let your eyes follow the natural curve around the eyes, continue around the mouth and down to the point of the chin, a heart begins to appear.

I’d never noticed it. Nobody had ever pointed it out to me, and I’d never looked at a face that way before. But once I saw it on one face, I saw it on every face in the room. The picture wasn’t asking me to admire the shape of a heart. It was asking me to notice what the heart surrounds.

The heart frames the eyes that behold Him and the mouth that praises Him.

Why this design? Of all the ways God could have formed the human face, why this one? Scripture shows us a Creator who is intentional. Nothing in His creation is random. So why would the human face be any different? Why would He place the eyes we use to behold Him and the mouth we use to praise Him inside the outline of a heart?  The eyes that search His Word when life doesn’t make sense. The eyes that close in quiet surrender because His presence is enough.  The mouth that whispers a prayer before the rest of the house is awake. The mouth that tells someone else what God has done.  

Jesus spoke often about the heart, not because it is something we can see, but because everything else flows from it. What fills the heart eventually reaches our eyes. It reaches our mouths. It shapes the way we look at Him and the way we speak of Him.

There’s something about a face turned towards God that words struggle to describe. Not perfection. Not performance. Just someone completely absorbed in the One they love. Since that day, I haven’t looked at a worshipping face in quite the same way. I notice eyes lifted towards heaven. I notice mouths singing words of praise. I notice expressions that belong to moments no one else can enter because they are shared only between a child of God and their Father. I don’t believe the Lord was showing me a hidden code. He simply slowed me down long enough to notice something that had been there all along. Something I’d looked at my entire life without ever really seeing.

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