One of the first things I was taught about God (even before I entered elementary school) was that God loves me and everybody else. Another of the earliest things I was taught about God (just as early in my life) was that God is everywhere. I still hold to these two basic principles, even though I admit to the complexity of using that word "God."
But how can I ever imagine that God is everywhere? (Especially when I have been cautioned against elevating anything in the world into a god, an idol.) How can I ever imagine that anything is everywhere?
For me, growing up as a child, it was the sky that helped me envision how God could be everywhere at once. God was invisible, but the sky, which I could see, expressed a kind of "everywhere." When I stood outside and looked up and around me, the sky seemed to surround everything on the Earth. As I scanned the sky and guided my sight back down to the Earth, the sky seemed to wrap around the edge of the Earth at the horizon, no matter which direction I was facing.
Today, I know of an open, inclusive church that has in its mission statement in the worship bulletin the phrase "God's all-encompassing love." Even though I myself struggle with how anybody could actually love every person on this planet (so ornery do we humans often become), I do have a sense of what "all-encompassing" is. I learned my sense of that from the over-arching, all-surrounding sky I could see when I was a child.
There was a second way, as a child, that the sky gave me a visual experience of "everywhere." For, after all, church-school had also reassured me that this God who loves me is with me no matter where I go. I got a sense of "no-matter-where-I-go" by watching the sky as I rode in the car at night. You can experience this yourself the next time you are riding in a vehicle at night (with someone else safely driving). Look out the side window and notice how the objects here on Earth zip by. A parked car flashes past the side window of your vehicle. And there's a tree a little further away from the road, so it moves less quickly -- but even it first comes into view and then is gone! That's how everything in life is: Things come, and things go.
But now notice, in contrast, the moon or stars up in the sky. Notice how they seem to travel with the vehicle you are in as it travels. Just like God.
My high-school English teacher taught me not to mix metaphors. But religion loves using multiple metaphors, and so I'm now going to do so. I'm going to mix metaphors because I think this metaphor of the heavens wrapping all around us resonates with another metaphor used a few times in the Bible (such as Psalm 61:4 & Matthew 23:37). Namely, the metaphor of God being like a caring mother bird sheltering her tiny chicks under her protective wings. We are like God's chicks.
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Have you ever tried to imagine God "everywhere"? How?
