Trinity

Here is a picture and you have to say what it is of. What is it??? This drawing is a special example of how people see the same thing differently - and what is very interesting about it is that no one can see both things at the same time - you see either the old woman, or the young woman.

God is one - like this picture is one picture - but we see God in three different ways - as Creator and Father - as Jesus, the Redeemer - and as the Holy Spirit, the breath of God and our comforter and sustainer. God is three things - but God is also only one thing.

Sometimes when we pray to God we say: Father, or Lord God, or Creator - Other times we pray: Dear Jesus - Still other times we pray to the Holy Spirit: as in the song Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. But we are always praying to the same God when we do it.

It seems mixed up - but it isn't - just like this picture isn't really mixed up; it is one thing - as is God - but we know it in two ways.

A story is told of a little girl who was asked to write an essay on "birth". She went home and asked her mother how she had been born. Her mother, who was busy at the time, said 'the stork brought you darling, and left you on the doorstep.'

Continuing her research she asked her dad how he'd been born. Being in the middle of something, her father similarly deflected the question by saying, 'I was found at the bottom of the garden. The fairies brought me.'

Then the girl went and asked her grandmother how she had arrived. 'I was picked from a gooseberry bush', said grandma.

With this information the girl wrote her essay. When the teacher asked her later to read it in front of the class, she stood up and began, "There has not been a natural birth in our family for three generations..."

When Jesus spoke to Nicodemus of being born from above - or being born anew - he was not talking of a natural birth. As he explained to Nicodemus, he was talking of a spiritual birth; a birth that was, and is, somehow, supernatural.

"Very truly, I tell you", Jesus said, "no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is Spirit.."

Let us think about our unnatural birth - and about the mystery that is involved in it - the mystery of God; the God who made us and gave us our first birth; the God who saves us, by becoming one with us, dying with us and for us; the God who lives and works in us and gives us our second, our unnatural birth.

Our experience of God is a marvellous and mysterious experience. It is like looking at the picture of the old hag - and the young woman, there is one reality - yet there is more than one reality....

And so it is with God.

We have and we know the God of Isaiah; the God who is high and lifted up in his temple, the God who speaks and brings forth all of creation, the God who is judge, lord, ruler, king; the God who is in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.

This God is strange to us, this God is beyond us, this God we dare not touch even though we know this God and he knows us, even though we see this God's signs all around us in the earth, the wind, the air, and the fire.

And then we have the God who is in Christ, the God who is lowly, and humble, the God who reaches out and touches others, the God who serves others, the God who walks the earth with us, and cries and laughs with us; the God who calls God Abba, Father, Daddy.. the God who is tempted with us, the God who hungers and thirsts with us, the God who embraces us and encourages us, the God who surrenders himself to death for us having only the promise and the hope of being raised again.

And we have and know God the Spirit - God the bringer of visions and of dreams, God the source of strength and of hope, God the supplier of healing words and of comfort filling prayer, God the wind, the breath, the air we breath, God the transformer, the one who gives new birth, new life, God the presence within us and the presence all around us, God calling to us - calling for us - calling through us, calling in us..

 material taken from the Internet.