God in Every Person

The way I spend my time at Kwantlen has taken a slight shift these past few weeks. I am transitioning out of office set-up and generally getting settled. Instead, I have been increasingly involved in what I came to Kwantlen to do: develop relationships and be involved in human interaction. These interactions are many and varied: some meetings, some passing conversations, some in depth discussions. And people of different religious backgrounds, ethnicity, and personalities all add to the variety.

If we think about it, even the frequent conversations we have with people we see often are never the same. Each day, each interaction offers something new and different, the chance to see a person in a new light, whether it's a new acquaintance or an old friend. It feels as though human persons have an infinite depth to them that cannot be full explored, either after one hour of conversation or a life-time of relationship.

What is it about humans that makes them so rich, interesting, and wonderful? I think it is God himself. Every person is a unique place where God can be received and given. That is why individual people are so valuable, because they offer us something that can't be found anywhere else: the presence of God expressed and experienced in a special way.

And this isn't meant to be a grand pronouncement about making every interaction we have with each person into some sort of extreme religious experience. Instead, it's about noticing that God is present in ordinary people doing ordinary things. Of course, some people we meet might not fit our standard of 'ordinary'. Or sometimes people might be hard to agree with, difficult to get along with. But none of that prevents them from being a place where God is at work. That is why Jesus ate with both "sinners" and the "teachers of the law"; no one was cornered off from being in a unique relationship with God.

One of the challenges of following Jesus is looking for and celebrating the different people we meet, in all of their particularities or mannerisms: race, religion, personality, or anything else does not prevent them from expressing that relationship with God. It is not our task to judge who has the Holy Spirit and who does not; instead it is our task to look for and rejoice in how God's love is everywhere, in all creation, and in every person.

This also means being OK with celebrating our own unique way of encountering God and sharing God's love with the world. Oscar Wilde said "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken". And if we really are ourselves I think that we are also attentive to helping other people be themselves. You and I and everyone else are on a journey of becoming who we are called to be by God. And this journey is not one that is in isolation. We become our true selves in God when we follow Jesus and try to help others find themselves in God's extravagant love.

God is encountered in each other. And so as I keep meeting new people and strengthening the relationships that have already begun, I hope that I can celebrate God at work in my life and through that celebration to help other's encounter God in their own lives. It doesn't have to be an extravagant thing: just a careful attentiveness to how every person in every moment is beloved by God and capable of becoming who they are called to be in that love.