Trinity and Humanity

Drew Barrymore’s latest artistic endeavor is a book of her photography called Finding It in Everything. In this book, Barrymore has taken photographs of hearts in unexpected places – a straw wrapper on the ground forms a shape of a heart, or even a heart-shaped hole in a T-shirt.  She confesses that she has always loved hearts, and when she took the time, she began to see them EVERYWHERE.

I think that’s true of many of our loves or interests.  When we are considering the purchase of a new car, we start to notice how many of that particular make/model are being driven around.  What we are thinking about raises our awareness in our ordinary lives.

I believe it works similarly in our lives when we begin to grasp the truth of Acts 17:28:  “In Him we live and move and have our being.”  This means that there is no separation of our church lives from our family lives or our work lives.  Jesus is everywhere, and as “God with Us” (Emmanuel), he is just as surely by our sides as we sing worship songs in church as he is when we go to work or bathe our small children.

Far too often, we only think about the presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit on our day of worship, and then we quickly forget their abiding presence during the hustle of daily living. However, by recognizing that there is no separation between our church lives and our work lives since Christ inhabits all, we invite the awareness we need to see the “hearts” or acts of love from God in our everyday lives.  We begin to live our lives without compartments, and instead, live as integrated, wholehearted beings.  The sacredness of the ordinary is revealed.

This awareness requires us to slow down a little.  I’m sure Drew Barrymore could have easily stepped on the heart-shaped straw wrapper if she had not been looking for hearts in her daily environment.  We can miss it, too, if we think we only meet Jesus for a couple of hours each week at church. The work that we do to feed our families is holy because Jesus is in it.  The family life we have is holy because Jesus is in it.   As we remind ourselves of the way that the Father, Son, and Spirit permeate our human existence even at the most mundane level, we find “hearts” that they have left for us, showing us our inclusion in their joy and fellowship.

~by Nan Kuhlman