Who is God?

• For starters, I believe there is a God.
• God appears in different ways to different people according to your faith, so my God may be very different from your God.
• Both of our versions of God may be true.
• As a child, I believed God was a bearded, fatherly figure who sat on a throne in heaven.
• I was later taught that God was the Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
• I now believe what the Christian theologian Paul Tillich once said: God is being itself, not a being.
• God is here right now, around me and also around you.
• I also believe what Paul said in Colossians 1: Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. But I also believe we are all the visible images of the invisible God.
• Likewise, I believe that like Jesus we are all the sons and daughters of the Creator.
• I relate to the Muslim belief that God does not possess human qualities or attributes.
• I also buy into the Hindu idea that God cannot be defined as a he or she.
• I believe that God sometimes appears in human form, in the face of a friend, a spouse, a child, or in anyone you encounter in everyday life.
• Like Emerson and Thoreau, I also believe it is possible to find God in nature.
• While God is all around us, the Divine is inside us as well. As Emerson said: “Look within, with pure eyes and simple trust and you shall find the Deity mirrored in your own soul.”
• I also trust what John said in 4:8, something Miriam Starr expanded upon with this quote: “Each faith tradition sings the same song in a different voice: God is love.”
• Of course, I could be wrong about everything, because ultimately God is a mystery.
• As John Templeton wrote: Why should we expect to be able to describe God when we know so little about divinity? Would a God we were able to describe be little more than a good, wise human?