Life From The Son

The Flower and the Smile: What Worship Really Is

There are moments when a question feels too obvious to ask and yet too heavy to ignore. One of those questions has followed me for years: Why does God want our worship?

If He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-sufficient, why would He want—much less need—millions of voices forever telling Him how wonderful He is? Wouldn’t that, after a few eternities, become repetitive even to Him?

I’ve asked it in sanctuaries filled with organ thunder, and I’ve asked it in silence while walking through empty streets long after midnight. The same question comes back: If God is the Source of everything, why does the Source need affirmation from its own creation?

Somewhere beneath that question is a smaller, more honest one: What is worship really for?

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The Trouble With Our Picture of Worship

Most of us grew up with images of worship that are beautiful—but also limited. We imagine choirs, hymns, raised hands, solemn faces, bowed heads. We picture stained glass and soft light and maybe, if we’re lucky, the faint smell of wood polish or incense.

But what if all of that—the architecture, the ceremony, the music—is only scaffolding around something invisible? What if the sound of the organ or the drum is just the echo of something deeper happening in the soul?

I remember sitting once in the middle of a Requiem Mass, surrounded by sound so magnificent that it seemed the air itself was trembling. The choir’s voices rose and fell like tides. The Latin words spoke of mercy, of light perpetual, of rest eternal. Every phrase was perfect. And yet, I felt nothing. I was there, but not there. My mouth formed the words, my heart did not.

That night I learned something that’s taken years to name:

You can sit in the middle of worship and not worship.

You can be surrounded by holiness and feel hollow.

The music can soar—and your soul remain seated.

It wasn’t the Requiem’s fault. It was mine.

I’d mistaken form for response, beauty for surrender.

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The Child in the Pew

A few months later, I saw something that healed a bit of that hollowness.

A little girl—no more than four—was kneeling on a church pew, turning around to smile at everyone behind her. Every few seconds she’d catch someone’s eye and grin as if to say, “Isn’t this wonderful?”

Her mother leaned forward and whispered, “Stop smiling. We’re in church.”

It was meant kindly, I’m sure. A mother teaching her child the reverence of the sacred. But the correction hit me like a parable.

Because what if the little girl was right?

What if she was doing the very thing we’re all here to do—and we adults have simply forgotten how?

We tell our children that worship is serious business, that God deserves solemn faces and controlled tones. Yet Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” Maybe what He meant was not childishness, but child-likeness: a soul still capable of wonder.

That child, smiling through the pew, was the most accurate theologian in the room.

Her joy was uncalculated, her reverence unlearned. She was simply happy to be where she was—to be loved, to belong, to see others who were also loved and belonging.

That’s worship.

It’s not the suppression of joy but its sanctification.

It’s not decorum—it’s delight.

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The Flower Turning

There’s another image that often comes to me when I think about worship. A single wildflower—alone in a crack of desert soil or pushing through a city sidewalk—turning toward the sun. It doesn’t choose to; it was made to. Its cells reach for light the way lungs reach for air.

“Whether in the desert or along a city sidewalk,” you once said, “the flower seeks the rays of the Son’s light.”

That’s worship in its purest form.

The turning itself.

The flower doesn’t flatter the sun; it responds to it.

It doesn’t sing hymns or recite prayers; it simply opens.

Its beauty is not performance—it’s participation.

The light falls; the petals unfold.

If you could translate the biology of that moment into language, it would say: I am alive because You are shining.

That’s worship.

The soul turning toward the Light that gives it life.

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When Reverence Becomes Rigidity

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to equate reverence with restraint. We confuse holiness with hush. We assume God prefers our silence to our laughter.

And yet the psalms explode with verbs that move and breathe: sing, shout, clap, dance, rejoice. The people of Israel worshiped with instruments, with feasting, with joy. David danced before the Lord—not because he was irreverent, but because he could no longer contain wonder inside his skin.

But institutional memory is long. Over centuries, reverence ossified into rigidity. We polished our sanctuaries and subdued our emotions. We decided that order was safer than awe. And little by little, worship shifted from response to routine.