On the wall is someone she knows

Published 11:21 pm Sunday, November 15, 2009

There he was outside of Target in Everett.

You could see a beard, eyes, a nose and a shiny halo above his head.

Sylvia Hecker told me where to park. I pulled in and immediately saw the face in a tile wall. She said it looked like Jesus.

I had to agree.

This was not my first come-to-Jesus meeting with Hecker.

As I wrote nearly five years ago, she showed me what she believed was the holy face on one of her Everett kitchen cabinet doors. For several years the family hadn’t noticed the image near the microwave. One day Hecker was rocked.

“I screamed,” she said. “The face of Jesus is looking at me.”

Her friend, Perla Magiba of Snohomish, said Hecker, 58, is a strong woman of faith.

“We talk about the word of God,” Magiba said. “We connect in the spirit.”

Hecker’s faith was fortified when God intervened in her life when she was 27.

“I was awed,” Hecker said. “God loved me.”

Years before she met her husband, Steve, Hecker had a dream.

“The Lord woke me up,” she said. “I sat up straight, like a board.” She said the Lord told her she would meet his servant named Steven. She said “OK, if you think that’s best,” and went back to sleep.

The nurse married Steve in 1981. Work took them to many states. He retired from a job at the Boeing Co. in Everett. Sylvia Hecker’s faith gave her comfort, she said, when her husband died a year and a half ago at the family home.

The day before he died, she said she strongly felt the presence of God. Hecker worships at Christian Faith Center in Everett, she said, to hear the word.

She said she doesn’t know why God reveals things to her eyes. When she saw the image of a face in the tile at Target, she had an inner conversation.

“What does this mean?” Hecker said she asked. “Lord, what is going on?”

I’m not sure, but the face in the tile goes on the list of wonderful images readers have shown me.

There was the chicken egg that looked like a swaddled baby Jesus; Elvis in a glass display case filled with sand; an Arlington rock that showed Jesus’ face in profile; and a quarter, found near Lake Goodwin, that had a big sausage stamped in the place President George Washington should have a nose.

We aren’t all believers, or see the same things, but we can appreciate one another’s vision.

Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451, oharran@heraldnet.com.