I HEARD a story once and I believe it’s true about a man who built a large hotel above in Cavan.

In a bar one night someone asked him “how come you built such a grand hotel in the middle of nowhere?” and the reply was very simple yet profound.

‘I didn’t build it in the middle of nowhere; I built it in the middle of everywhere. Obviously a lot of thought went into the choice of location, with regards to access roads etc.

The name of the hotel is The Slieve Russell Hotel and I’m sure they won’t mind me giving them a small bit of advertisement.

Our approach to God in our Lives can be very similar. God is everywhere in our lives or God is nowhere in our lives.

God means everything to us or God means nothing to us.

You can argue as much as you want about it as they say, ‘til the cows come home’ but at the end of the day we either appreciate God’s presence in our lives or we don’t.

A good way to look at it, I believe, is that we may or may not appreciate God’s presence in our lives (and have no doubt even the most loyal are tested), but God will always appreciate us.

His arms are always open and welcoming whether we appreciate His presence or not.

He also gave us a bit of very sound advice when He told us not to try to understand Him, and this is the difficult bit for our minds.

In The Gospel we have the story of Doubting Thomas (John 20:29) and He said;

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”

The word ‘see’ can also mean understand.

For instance – I see what you mean can also be written as I understand what you mean.

So the above quote could also be written as;

“Blessed are those who have not understood and yet have believed’

True Faith is believing without understanding.

The human mind will never understand the unlimited love of God simply because the human mind will never understand the term unlimited.

It boggles with the term unlimited in the same way that it boggles with the terms nowhere and everywhere and nothing and everything.

How can we explain nothing without getting our minds into a conundrum? For instance you could argue that ‘air’ is nothing.

If I asked you to give me a bucket of it ‘Could you?’ Or if I said the bucket that you gave me was overflowing  you would probably start laughing.

Yet we cannot survive without air in our lives. It is only when the supply of air becomes limited that we come to appreciate the importance of it (remember the miners in Mexico recently?).

‘All I need is the air that I breathe’

God, just like air is vital to our very existence and happiness, but it is often only in times of great difficulty that we come to appreciate His Presence.

In a nutshell – appreciate God in our lives but don’t try to understand Him.

• Next week I am going to write about — ‘The sound of one hand clapping’