May 22, 2016

Holy Mysteries and Holy Cats!

"God works in mysterious ways!"

Maybe you've heard that saying once or twice.
Maybe you've said it when you've seen God work things out in a way you didn't see coming.

There are a lot of things about God and the way he works that can be hard to understand. For instance, Christians declare that God exists as a holy Trinity. That is, there's the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and all three are God, but there is only one God. "God in three persons," we sing in one of the classic hymns. Each of the three is not "part" of God, and they don't represent varying aspects of God, but all three are in fact God in his fullness... and there is only one God. People have tried to use various analogies to explain this, but every analogy eventually falls short.

When we receive the Lord's Supper, we believe Christ is present, but how and what happens is the subject of debate. Different faith traditions explain it in different ways, but in the UMC, we explain what we can the best we can, and we say it is a "Holy Mystery". Personally, I love this expression, because you don't have to understand everything about something in order to accept and believe it.

There are many things we don't understand about God, but that's OK.

I was thinking about this over the past week as I've been watching the kittens play.

Bruce & Wayne are a handful!
This past week, Amber brought home two kittens,
     and they're very small,
          and they're very curious,
               and they're very energetic, to say the least!