I was looking at the beauty in the iridescent colours of a starling’s plumage this morning, and thinking of the inexhaustible wonder of Gods creation, down to the tiniest detail of the smallest feather. The 17th century  French theologian Blaise Pascal wrote about the two infinites, the infinitely small and the infinitely big, and how God encompasses them both. As I looked at the light on that starling’s plumage (the bird in the photo is the actual one I am talking about), somehow I felt as though I was looking into that space, and I remembered how Jesus said, as He was praying to His Father shortly before going to the cross, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)

Eternal life is knowing God. The whole of eternity is in God. He is inexhaustible, never ending. I was eating my dinner yesterday, and I noticed something moving on my trousers. It was a tiny little creature that had come from goodness knows where, no more than a couple of millimetres long, and it was crawling caterpillar fashion across my trousers. In that moment too, I thought of the wonder of life, and what it was in the little thing that was driving it to wander resolutely across the totally alien environment of my trouser leg. And one more moment: I was having a coffee with a friend on Friday morning, sitting outside Costa in the sunshine, and a beautiful red admiral butterfly came and settled on my leg (what is it about that leg at the moment?) and just stayed there for a couple of minutes. Right there in the concrete retail park, a living jewel just dropped onto me in all its beauty.

Butterflies, tiny moving creatures, starlings’ plumage: all amazing expressions of the wonder of life. What else did Jesus say? “I’ve come to bring them life, and that in abundance.“ (John 10:10)  Eternal life is knowing God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. In heaven, when the limitations of our bodies are finally dispensed with, we can know God  as spiritual beings, eternally and inexhaustibly. But on Earth now we can know Him too, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, when we look at the inexhaustible wonder of the life all around us. I was actually asking God this morning why He wants us to worship Him; why did He sent His son so that we could know Him? I felt that His answer to me was quite simple: it is so we can know the source of everything we have, and be grateful for it. That was my answer – yours might be different of course.

A final picture, and of a bird again. I put birdseed on feeder trays on a table outside the window of the room where I have my prayer time in the morning. The starling is standing in one. I was watching a crow shovel up some of that birdseed. As soon as I move, the birds on the table fly away. All of life is a gift. We can shovel it up like that crow and fly away from the sight of the One who put it there, or we can come to Him and actually feed from His hand. I know what I would rather do. Whatever is happening around us in the world, He is always standing there, faithful, unshaken, with His hand held out, calling us to come to Him for our daily bread. The more we approach Him the better we know Him; and knowing Him is eternal life.

And here’s the thing: God chose to reach out His hand to us in the form of a Man, His Son Jesus Christ, who came in the flesh. We need to feed from His hand now, while we still have the life He has given us here on Earth. If we keep flying away from Him while we too are in the flesh, it will be too late when our flesh is dead.