What I think when I think about God...

If I am challenged to think about God, this is how I will think about God. There is nothing that he cannot do. He has no limits. He is God anyway. He created everything that has existed, is existing and will ever exist. Some of his greatest creation apart from us are time, love, free will and the universe or multiverses. He started it all and will ultimately end it all. He is personal too and that is what makes my belief in him so real, intimate and agreeable. He has created me in his image and my enduring hope is that I can expect myself to look like him. I take image here to mean appearance as well as human traits and emotions. 

I can therefore trust that he feels how I feel and he sees what I see. I can also trust that he loves me unconditionally because he would not have gone through all the trouble of creating everything humanly conceivable and possible for my existence and even thriving if his love was ever conditional.

God in my mind is perfect. He is perfect even before I had the mind to think that he is perfect. Although I would never come to terms with perfection or understand how it works in my world, I am at least comforted to know that God is perfect and he works everything out perfectly in a time he calls his time.

He has no beginning and no end; or else he would be less than the perfection that my mind has come to conceive him to be. He is also everywhere. Theologians call that being omnipresent. But his presence is never intrusive, never a bother unlike the secret surveillance of a police-state. In fact, I can think of his presence in my life as reassuring, inspiring and even empowering. It is like the meeting of soul mates where the dialogue between them can only be understood by them and no one else. It is therefore exclusively personal. It is also an intimacy that not even marital consummation could compare.

Paradoxically too, this relationship is also inclusive in that it would not turn me into a recluse, a snob or a self-complacent preacher. It would not make me repellant to others, to myself or to him.

But I have to understand that God can at the same time be a mystery. He can be a perplexity so perplexing that my limited mind could never completely unravel. Because he is God, he has to remain God. And being him is to be beyond what my mind can fully understand. This mystery has to be what it has to be and that is to be a mystery that would surpass all human understanding (but not human yearning of course).

He would have to be one or two steps (or innumerable steps) ahead of the learning curve or human scientific discovery. He would have be measured by infinity while we are measured by miles. He would have to inhabit an eternity while we survive only a lifetime. He is God no less and we are just not. He cannot be penetrated in the same way that a cell, a gene, a subatomic particle, a quark, a dimensional symmetry or an energy force can  be penetrated. He is beyond the means, probe and tools of all human earnest endeavors.

For to know everything there is to know about God would be to know nothing more there is to know about him. And to know nothing more there is to know about God is to arrive at exactly where he was and is and will be and that is inconceivable even with the best of human ingenuity and imagination. To arrive at this preposterous knowledge would spell the end of his divinity and the start of our impunity. This is one eventuality that will never be eventuated. Fat chance.

We are but a fraction of him, a loose shard of an image of him. At best, we reflect only a part of him that he chooses to reveal to us and no more. His sovereignty is where our knowing and understanding of him ends and the impenetrable mystery of him starts. This is a fact I must accept if I am to be challenged to think about God. It is a non-negotiable term of the start and end of my mental conception of him.

Theologians call this gap faith as the existential bridge to connect what we know and what we will never come to know. And for this reason and this reason alone, the mystery of God would be both the source of my continued believing in him and the source of my continued doubts about him. This faith-driven-doubt-ridden struggle in my heart planted by the one who deems it fit to put it there for reasons exclusive only to himself is the reason why I will forever be inspired and tortured at the same time by him. It is a struggle that will always keep my faith alive and almost dead at the same time for the purpose of subsequent reviving. 

It is a dichotomy of two minds fighting for prevalence, preemption and precedence in my life. Ironically the road ends for me the moment it starts for me. It is a human discovery to not discover humanly further. It is the dead-ending of the beginning and the beginning of the dead end.

If my mind is about knowing everything about God, then the end of this journey of knowing everything about him is the start of believing in him with this mind-challenged faith. This same faith will never tell me enough about the gratuitous sufferings in this world and a loving and all-powerful God. It will never tell me enough about the trump of evil and the torture of the righteous. Neither will it tell me enough about the deliberate hiddenness of God, the death of an innocent child, the lust of an ungodly man, and the injustice of oppression, religious hypocrisy, natural calamities, human sexual abuses, the rejection of those different from us, the hubris of men, and the soul-wrenching pain of doubts.

Faith must thus fill in the gap for me - even when sometimes faith has a short but no less flexible reach.

Herein ends my challenge to think about God. It is a challenge because he has created me to know him and to know him is what will ultimately define me. Yet to know him is not to know what I am dying to know about him. It is a subjective itch that I can never objectively scratch. This mystery about him is put in place to set me apart from him, but at the same time, to join me together with him. It is therefore a lifetime struggle of faith over doubts and doubts over faith. That is to me the authenticity of faith and to deny it is to deny what he has created and destined me for. And if his intention has always been to keep the believing in him meaningful, suspenseful and even painful, then he has done it most perfectly. Amen. Cheerz.