While touring the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, my wife and I came across the most fascinating work by American artist Stephen Hannock.

The mural is huge, eight to ten feet wide, and around 6 feet high.

The wonderment part of viewing the piece is, that as you walk closer to the canvas, at an unforeseen point, what you see in the picture is instantly transformed. You suddenly notice that lines and details in the painting are not plants and landscapes, but words that form stories. These phrases give historical facts and describe events that evidently happened in the location the painting depicts.

“Wow!” we exclaimed when we first noticed. A world within a world revealed itself before our gaze that was not apparent from a distance.

It’s impossible to tell in the picture I’ve inserted here, but if you look closely, you’ll see rows of crops in the fields, and light brown lines across the horizon in the forests.

These rows and lines are sentences. The mural is filled with thousands of words that tell stories. Some sentences are very long. Some are a few words. But the verbiage is everywhere you look.

What an eye-popper when you first notice!

I thought about the larger spiritual lessons to learn.

People are this way.

When first meeting a stranger, you might sum them up in general terms about what your eye takes in. You might draw broad characterizations about their personality from how they look. But when you get to know the person better, you begin to see “the writing in the lines.” You discover marvelous qualities, talents and attributes in that individual that were not initially apparent.

And the same rule applies for getting to know each other spiritually.

To the mortal eye, friends and neighbors appear as landscapes of mortality—material bodies with physical features. But when you search them spiritually, and strive to see them close up the way God made them to begin with, you begin to take in the spiritual detail God inscribed into their being.

Instead of seeing hair color, body proportions, height and weight, you see the nature of God expressed through the kindness, wisdom, strength or character they embody. You see the words of God written into the tablet of their being…“Precious child of God, beloved and cared for, valued and worthy…”

The old cliché “see the handwriting on the wall,” has taken on new meaning for me!

The handwriting is always before us, and if we look close enough, we’ll see it.
We did in the above piece of art! And we’re all the artwork of God.