I was sent this picture taken by photographer Sean Pavone.
It is a beautiful nighttime photo of the New York City waterfront. With the bright city lights reflected off the calm waters, this is a photo that captures the energy of a city that never sleeps.
Thought on Thursday – June – 15/06/2017
Thought For The Week
Trinity Sunday: we don’t celebrate a puzzle, but we do pay homage to a mystery. Puzzles get solved, mysteries don’t. They’re not for solving. The more you delve into a mystery the more you realise there is to delve into. Thus it is with that mystery we so abstractedly call: the Most Holy Trinity. ~Tom Cahill
In school I have 3 boxes of jigsaws and I sometimes take them to the Prayer Room and lay them out on the floor. One is 1000 pieces, the next one is 100 and the third one is 20 pieces. I explain to the students that each pile of jigsaw pieces can stand for a typical day that we go through.
Some days are like the 20 pieces jigsaw, easy to put together, big pieces and everything fits just grand.
Some days are like the the 100 piece jigsaw, harder to put together, more pieces and these days can be challenging and sometimes difficult.
Then some days are nearly impossible, like the 1000 piece jigsaw. There are so many tiny pieces and all look so alike. Such days are hard to make sense of and can be very challenging too.
So whether our life at the moment feels like a 20 pieces jigsaw, a 100 piece jigsaw or a 1000 piece jigsaw, God is somewhere in there too helping us put together the different pieces as best we can.
So if we then add the word mystery (which is at the heart of the feast of the Holy Trinity) what might that mean? It is like emptying thousands and thousands of different jigsaws, mixing them all together and then trying to put them all together. It is nearly an impossible task. It is also nearly an impossible task to say we know everything about God because we don’t.
But there are a few things we know very well and mainly that God is love. The Holy Trinity speaks of a God who knows our story, our difficulties, our heartaches, our weaknesses, our disappointments and so much more. Scriptures have many references, speaking about God as a God of tenderness, full of compassion, rich in faithfulness and kindness. This is just one piece of the jigsaw. There are so many more.
The invitation is to hold whatever pieces of the jigsaw about God that we like and are comfortable with. We can’t hold all the pieces and no one can either. But the ones we have we will treasure knowing they do make a difference in our lives.
