The Holy Trinity: One Love, Many Expressions

When God Looked Like a Snowman

Have you ever wondered what God looks like?

When I was at primary school, I used to think sometimes about this.

I don’t think children worry about all the heavy, complicated stuff adults use to explain God — they just imagine.

And in my imagination, God looked like …  a snowman.

A very friendly one too, if perhaps a bit serious. Made of fluffy white snow, and — for reasons I can’t quite explain — he wore a very smart black scarf, and I treasured that image I kept in my mind.

It makes me smile now, because there was something sincere about it. I wasn’t trying to be funny, and don’t think I even told anyone of my theological breakthrough.

Because I was just trying to make sense of Someone I somehow felt was there. Someone kind and safe. Someone who could be recognised even by small children.

And that’s where our journey with God often begins: with imagination, with longing, with a sense of presence before we have the language for it.

Looking back on it, I see that even then, I was reaching for the mystery of God — a God who is real, but not easily described.

Teenage Years: Evolution, Fear, and the Discovery That God Is Love

Then, years later, when I was a teenager, we started learning about evolution at school.

I remember being genuinely astonished — not by the science, but by the idea that some people thought this meant God didn’t exist.

It felt to me as though someone was trying to take away a Person I had always known.

I wrestled with that for quite a while.

I didn’t like the thought that God might not be there and didn’t have the language or the arguments to sort it all out.

But in the middle of that confusion, one thing stayed steady:

I still sensed a particular kind of love — a presence beyond me — and I trusted it.

And that simple trust in God’s love has never really left me.

What I didn’t realise then — but see more clearly now — is that love has a shape.

Pentecost, the Great Commission and the Holy Trinity

Last week, as Christians celebrated Pentecost, we remembered the moment the Holy Spirit came down and worked within the disciples — moving them from simply knowing about God to living the life he was calling them into.

But Pentecost was never just an event. It was — and still is — an invitation into the very life and purpose of God.

Which brings us to the Great Commission.

St Matthew tells us that the risen Christ met his disciples on a mountain. They worshipped him, yet they were still unsure, still holding wonder and doubt together.

That name is the one Jesus himself gave us : the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit — the life of God we now call The Holy Trinity.

Today we understand this as:

• The Father — the love that gives life, the steady source behind everything that exists.

• The Son — the love that comes close, love we can see and recognise in the compassion of Jesus.

• The Holy Spirit — the love that moves within and among us, prompting, strengthening, and guiding.

The Holy Trinity – one love – expressed in three ways.

And make no mistake: the Church’s mission began not in clarity, but in the honest muddle of human faith.

But it also began with a promise — perhaps the most extraordinary promise Jesus ever made:

“I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

A promise that the One who sends us is also the One who stays with us.

Knowing God, Knowing Ourselves

As we reflect on the Trinity, perhaps we feel we ought to understand it better — to properly grasp how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit fit together.

I have sometimes approached this as though the mystery were a puzzle we should be able to solve.

But the truth is, if we’re honest, most of us don’t fully understand even ourselves.

We often surprise ourselves with our reactions, our fears, our courage, and our contradictions.

And if we struggle to know our own hearts — and the hearts of those closest to us — how could we ever possibly expect to neatly understand God?

So perhaps the point is not to understand God, but to trust in his goodness.

Perhaps the Trinity is not something to master — but is a mystery to live within.

Not a problem to solve — but a relationship that holds us, shapes us, and sends us out.

Returning to the Child — And the Life We Lead Today

And so today, as we reflect on the meaning of Trinity Sunday, I find myself thinking again of that small child who imagined God as a snowman.

I think she was trying to make sense of a presence she had felt — but not fully understood.

And the teenager who wrestled with the theory of evolution — I think she was trying to protect something precious she had sensed was important, even if she couldn’t yet explain why.

But as an adult, even after three years at theological college and all the years since, I still don’t know what God looks like.

I still don’t really understand how evolution fits with being created in God’s image.

But the amazing thing is this: I now understand that I don’t need to know everything.

I understand that it’s OK to rest in my belief that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — a God who creates, who saves, and who sustains.

So perhaps the invitation today is this:

to let go of the need to define God, or to set modern science against ancient scripture.

To rest in the mystery of the Trinity — the three in one.

To trust in the love that created us, the love that walks beside us each day, and the love that fills us with God’s own breath of life.

And perhaps that is enough — just to believe.

But if we cannot quite believe, then at least to hope.

To live in hope that what Jesus said is true: that the One who made us, who walks with us, and who breathes his Spirit into us really does mean it when he says,

“I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

And perhaps, in the end, that is all we ever truly need —

to live our lives within that hope,

within that promise.