Thomas Troeger, a Presbyterian pastor and gifted preacher, tells a story of an experience he had once. He wrote:

"One day several years ago I was in a department store buying myself a new shirt when a complete stranger walked up to me and said, ‘You must be Henry Troeger's son.'

"I looked at this person and I said, ‘I don't believe I have ever seen you.'

"He said, ‘Oh, no, you have never met me at all, but a long time ago I worked with your father. I was a close colleague of his and when I saw you across the aisle of the store, I said to myself, `I'd know that face anywhere.'You are the very image of your father.'

"For several weeks after that, I would sometimes be going down the street, and maybe come around a corner, and catch my reflection in a store window. I started to see myself with the eyes of someone else. It is not like looking into the mirror in the morning. I would come around the corner, catch that reflection and I would think, ‘That's Henry Troeger.' All of a sudden I would be seeing how I bore the image of my father."

And so it is with us.

Each one of us is created with the image of God indelibly imprinted on our souls, so that, in some miraculous and inexplicable way, the diverse expressions of God that are you and you and you and me all come together to illustrate the mystery, to live together in community as we do our best to display for the world all the possibilities that the divine imprint on all of us could mean.