The Snake, The Spear, The Fan, The Tree Trunk, The Wall, And The Rope

There's an old Indian parable of a group of blind men encountering an elephant for the first time. One feels the elephant's long, sinuous trunk and declares the elephant must be just like a snake. No, another argues, feeling the hard, smooth tusk, it is just like a spear. A third feels the big flappy ear and concludes that it must be just like a fan. A fourth feels the strong, sturdy leg and imagines a tree trunk. A fifth touches the elephant's broad side and thinks of a wall. A sixth feels the tail and says the elephant must be just like a rope. None of them have the whole picture, but all of them can describe a part of the elephant in their own unique way. Our Heavenly Father and His magnificent plan for us are too big and too glorious for us to fully comprehend all on our own. The best any of us can hope for with our mortal minds and our blind eyes is to grope for some tiny piece of understanding. Each of us knows God a little differently. Like the blind men grasping at understanding different parts of the elephant, we each come away with a unique perspective on Who God is and what He means to us. For some of us, God is the spear, and for others, He may be our biggest fan. He can be the wall that protects us, the tree trunk that supports us, or the rope cast down into the pit to pull us out. For some of us, He may even be a fiery serpent piercing our conscience and goading us to repent. In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the story usually devolves into arguing and violence as each man becomes entrenched in their own opinions. But that is not how it has to be with our relationship with God and with each other. We have all been called to testify of our Heavenly Father's love one to another. This testimony that we share should not be some generic, homogenized, one size fits all kind of thing. We have been called to share our testimony. Ours. Not anyone else's. We each feel God differently than any other human being in the whole history of the world. But when we share our specific point of view, our testimony, with others, they can add our unique understanding to their picture of God, and if they share their testimony with us, then we can add their understanding to our picture. Each testimony we hear adds another puzzle piece to our picture. No single one of us can fully comprehend the fullness of God's majesty, but all of us together can get pretty close. We should not let our unique perspectives divide us but rather bring us together. Just because someone else sees God as a wall and we see Him as a rope does not make either of us wrong, nor does one understanding cheapen or diminish the value of the other. We should rejoice when someone shares a conception of God that is utterly different from our own and yet still rings true. Now our understanding has grown. The blind men could not wrap their minds around a creature that could be snake and spear and fan and tree trunk and wall and rope and so many other things besides. Let us not be blind. Let us not allow ourselves to place limits on what God can and cannot be. I know that God placed each of us on Earth because we each have our own piece of the puzzle, and God's work and His glory will not be fulfilled until He has brought every single piece into its proper place. I hope each of us can spend the rest of eternity sharing our unique understanding of our Heavenly Father so that we can truly come to know Him in a million billion different ways.