Welcome to another new week, the final in the month of January. When I realised this a slight panic came over me. I had yet to make any firm plans for the upcoming Chinese New Year which is a significant one for me as it is the Year of the Fire Horse. I am 60 this year and am grateful to God for sustaining my life over the course of nearly six decades.
I have decided to return to Kuala Lumpur earlier than planned, so with limited time before travelling I need to cancel, reschedule and cut short some upcoming appointments and meetings. As the British Airways website asked to confirm, and I was happy to acknowledge, I am (only) human.
If we are humans (noun) and human (adjective) then what is God? Well, in a sense the straightforward, but I hope not flippant, answer is that God is God. There have been tomes written about how the Christian God exists in three forms: as God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. This is what Christians call the Holy Trinity.
God the Father is what people seem to understand: someone ‘out there’ we don’t see. It is easy to impose on this God the attributes we ourselves would like to see in a higher being. If you have visited the Sistine Chapel, then on the ceiling you will see God depicted as a bearded grand old man.
On a recent visit to the Hawai’i exhibition at the British Museum there were carvings of deities with quite stern and austere faces, perhaps someone we should fear.
God the Holy Spirit is also quite relatable. Someone invisible who lives in you as a guide and companion along the straight and narrow path of your spiritual journey.
God the Son is where the problems lie. On the one hand, it is marvellous as well as miraculous that a great and powerful God would humble himself and come into the world in human form, in order to bridge that mental and physical gap between us and himself. On the other hand, since we are fallible (really, we are human) we fall into the trap of fashioning the son of God into someone like ourselves. The big bomb then falls when we are told that Jesus is the someone who holds the key to salvation and eternal life. The Bible explains this as Jesus being fully God and being fully human.
Whilst I personally don’t wrestle with this, I can see why this is a challenge for so many people. But I trust that God reveals himself to us when the time is right. We made two puzzles last week and one was very interesting as we only had a partial picture to guide us. Packaged as a Surprise Puzzle, you are only given a picture of the border/ frame then you have to work step-by-step to complete the whole puzzle. It was very fun and I enjoyed the details as they came into sight. I would like life to be like this: wonderment at the big picture although it is incomplete, and fulfilment as the pieces are fitted together over time.
Over the weekend we had a Galette des Rois, some focaccia and a baguette from Miel Bakery in Warren Street. The baguette left me speechless. As it says in my favourite Katie Melua ballad: Now that I’ve found you, I’ll call off the search.
We celebrated Mr Gochugaru’s birthday with a frosted carrot cake, and it was very good. I am calling it Carrot Cake Number Five as there are four previous carrot cake recipes. I will share the recipe later. For now, it is time to sign off and start winding down the work here in London.
