Morning Meditation: We are Imago Dei

Loving God, Creator of every face I will see today,

Before the first light broke over creation, You imagined us — each one stamped with Your own likeness, carrying the fingerprint of the Divine. The Hebrew writers called it Imago Dei, the image of God, and it was not a metaphor. It was a declaration: every human soul is sacred ground.

Yet the prophet Amos thundered from the hills of Tekoa because Israel had forgotten this. They trampled the poor in their courts, turned away the needy at their gates, and offered incense with hands that refused to do justice. And God, through Amos, would not be appeased by their worship: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

Lord, open my eyes this morning to see Your image where I have learned not to look — in the woman holding a cardboard sign at the intersection, in the coworker everyone ignores at lunch, in the child whose name no teacher can pronounce. Forgive me for the times I have reduced Your image-bearers to inconveniences or abstractions.