Trinity and Humanity

One of my favourite television series, “Fringe,” revolves around the tension between twin parallel universes. In it, you meet two versions of the central characters, as different in some ways as they are similar in others. Some are heroes in one universe and perpetrate evil acts in the other. The central events of their lives are different in each universe, and it has shaped who they have become.

The show has often made me think of who I would have been had the keys events in my life been different ones. My life could have been quite different — in ways we consider good and bad that I will never know. I could have ended up quite different from the person I am today, yet underneath it all, I still would have been me.

I believe that it is this “me” that Jesus sees when he looks at me. The “me” I am despite all that life has done, with or without my conscious consent, to show more or less of who I am inside that is beautiful to him.

Often, the command to love one another seems an unreachable ideal. I don’t have to go any further than my Facebook newsfeed to find people I know behaving in unlovable ways. Every day there is news of pedophiles, murderers, or those who have absconded with people’s retirement accounts. It’s hard to feel love for the person in the grocery store checkout lane making crass jokes or screaming at her children, let alone for someone who has done something to grievously injure another.

Here in this universe, I generally see only one dimension of who a person is. But Triune God is not limited to this dimension as I am. So while we struggle to love, Father, Son and Spirit do not.

I have always been fascinated by the concept of time — the fact that it is something to which we are bound here on earth as humans but that does not in any way bind God. I can only conjecture as to what the implications may be — certainly, I can’t come close to reality.

But I believe that when Jesus sees a person, he sees the whole person — the one-time sweet, innocent baby/child with endless potential and enormous hopes and dreams, all the ways the individual has been hurt or limited by the seemingly random circumstances of life, and also, perhaps especially, the person they are becoming nonetheless. He sees them past, present and future. I believe that he knows full well the amazing person that they become ultimately even if it is nearly invisible to the rest of us here on earth.

Since no one has died even in old age perfect, I don’t believe that this chance to become who we were meant to become ends with the cessation of our physical lives. As a soul exits the constructs of time, there is a great deal that can happen to heal and transform us in what we would view as a millisecond. Again, we can’t begin to know how it all works, but I believe that the godly people we are all on the way to becoming are fully evident to Triune God today — because, not being bound by time, they have experienced the culmination of our growth, healing and transformation. They are experiencing us that way.

While we crawl around as caterpillars, they know us as butterflies.

If we look closely, with eyes of compassion and grace as he does, we can catch glimpses of the wings on the people around us. Don’t forget to look for your own too!

~ by Jeannine Buntrock