Morning rituals are sacred. In our home, I deliver coffee to my wife in bed and remind her of what I told her the day before–that she is the most incredibly special and beautiful woman in the world. When business demands that I’m away from home, I make a point to phone, text or leave a note to that same effect. On occasion when we are traveling together, our daybreak tradition continues with the added twist that I go downstairs (we always ask for a room on the top floor of wherever we’re staying), scout what’s available for breakfast, and then retrieve for my wife what she chooses. Later, I go back down to have my own. This morning found us going through our well rehearsed routine in a Sleep Inn high up in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Hotel breakfast groups are typically memorable because travel tends to bring out whatever is down deep inside each of us. This morning’s gathering was stereotypically stereotypical: A couple sat together on the perimeter, the man lecturing his female companion on fine points of theology, with a little Greek thrown in to impress. Perched in the middle of the room, a massive man amassed a healthy mountain of fruit and then proceeded to eat most everything sweet in sight. A woman of significant girth working for the hotel stood in front of the breakfast buffet, straightening creamers and butter, causing everyone to go around her to score anything to eat. Opposite the religious couple, an elderly gentleman sat by himself and carried on a lucid conversation with no one in particular. Still another man sitting behind me grunted and sighed with every staccato motion of fork to mouth. All in all, a regular cirque du petit déjeuner.

What these two scenarios hold in common is the hope that we are each created in God’s image, and that whatever imago dei means, at the very least, it declares that something incredibly special resides within each of us. Hopefully, we see this in each other, and given time, we may even see it in ourselves.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (‭Genesis‬ ‭1‬:‭26-27‬ KJV)