Fully BelovedSample

No wonder the idea of God as relational, what the old poet and priest John Donne called “the three-person’d God,” resonates. Relationality, worked and kneaded into reality through and through, cannot help but shine out.

In Scripture, we get a timeline going way further back, preceding us by eons, of an everlasting being at home with relating. Our connecting has a cosmic backdrop—a Divinity for whom interaction is a natural, a given. When you have a God who is one in three, already in relationship before creating the world, you can expect relationship to exist at the core. For we see a creativity that has a relational feel, not simply a mechanical or aesthetic “big bang.” . . .

Take a scrap of a psalm: “You created my inmost being.” (Psalm 139:13). You created me, made me, the psalmist said to God—reassuring us that the universe has at its foundation not dumb luck or iffy coincidence but purposeful reality.

Creation, then, is more than an artful assemblage. God uses the material he made all around us and fashions from it something especially magnificent: a person. He’s willing to rework this masterpiece, too, as any patient artist could and would.

For this is no vaguely disinterested deity at work, off working in solitary reveries. And as God fashioned the world—creating something out of nothing, as the first book of the Bible tells us—it was more than lonesome work. There’s delighted collaboration. For centuries scholars have puzzled over the moment when God said, “Let us make humankind.” Make people in our image. But I see a hint here. Not a proof of the Trinity, but a glimmer. Yes, God created, not gods, Scripture tells us. One God. Yet the Trinity matters here—hugely. For from before time began, there was confraternity. A community. Boggling the mind, eternity past brims with relationship.

Prayer

Father, I am so grateful that you connect with me. Thank you for creating me to have a relationship with you. Amen.