YouTube has a hugecatalog of videos that count to infinity and visualize how big these numbers are. We've watched so many of them. They also like to watch videos that help you imagine what a 4 dimension object passing through our 3 dimensional space might look like. These videos can make my brain hurt as I try to bend my limited world perspective to wrap around things much bigger or smaller or in more dimensions. My brain begins to hurt. There is so much that exists that I cannot interact with or truly understand. It's just too big or too small or outside my perception.
"As far as the east is from the west, so are my ways from your ways. "
"With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was, and who is to come. The Almighty"
“From heaven the Lord looks down and sees all mankind; from his dwelling place he watches all who live on earth…”
Thinking about an infinite God, heaven or eternity can't feel like standing at the edge of an abyss that is so deep you can't see to the bottom. It becomes obscured by a blackness as the light is swallowed up in the largeness. It is a dizzying feeling and I slowly back away.
The universe is so vast and has been around for so long, and yet what we know of size and time is dwarfed next to the infinite nature of God. This hurts my mind.
But somehow it is comforting. Whenever I feel like I have a hard time understanding God or faith or the mysteries of faith, I am comforted by how big and far into the universe, we as humans can understand and how much bigger still is the nature of God.
In my daily life I tend to picture God as some disembodied human type being. Maybe some old man in the clouds. On more enlightened days, I think of God as wind, everywhere at once touching everyone but invisible. Or light that comes from some far corner of the universe and reaches me as warmth and illumination. But these are imaginations of God within point of reference that I can get my head around.
God is bigger still than the most infinite abstractions that I can conjur up in my imagination.
And so Jesus. A man, with a mother who ate and drank and wept and flipped over tables. A bridge to connect humanity with the infinite nature of God. Jesus spoke with stories and shared food around tables. And yet, Jesus was enigmatic. As much as I can hold Jesus in my imagination, He escapes my ability to know him really. His words, his life, his stories. There are these twists and bits that don't fully resolve that point to the eternal, unknowable nature of God.
As I scratch my head and wonder, my mind lands back as the famous words of Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:
For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes,what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
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