Are you a do-it-yourself fanatic? Do you sew, or cook, or write computer programmes? Are you creative? Do you enjoy tinkering with the car, gardening, looking after children? If you don't enjoy the experience, at least do you tolerate making the beds, dusting the tables, laying for meals and clearing up after them?
If we think of things we have made in the past, were any of them so well constructed that we said, "That's perfect"? How about making something more complicated? A sparrow, for example?
You may have guessed where this is leading. For the Bible constantly refers to "the works of God's hands" - not just one sparrow, but at least a sufficient number for them to "go forth and multiply"! And not just sparrows, but larks, eagles, tigers, wasps and cabbages. Have you ever looked at a mosquito under a microscope, before squashing it to a blood-laden speck on the wall? How long would it take a do-it-yourselfer to construct a wasp, even a dead one?
It is pointless to ask ourselves how, when, or in what way God is involved in the details of the world around us, because our minds are not capable of thinking in those terms. Nor is it particularly relevant to the way we lead our lives, except in that it focuses our thoughts on our own relationship to the One who is outside our purely human existence.
But the Bible is not just about God's handicraft. The same God who designed the cabbage and the slug (for each other?) also guards and protects us, both as a race ("humanity"), as a group ("my people") and as individuals. Time and again we read of individuals being "singled out" for a particular task, like Moses or Paul, or for a particular blessing, like the widow at Zarephath (1 Kings 17:14), Mary (Luke 1:30) or Jairus' daughter (Mark 5). Again, our human minds cannot grasp the way God's "angels watch over us" (Ps 91:11) (and vice versa! (Matt 18:10))
And not only does God guard and protect us, but God forgives us when we wander from the right way. And more besides. The Gospel, the Good News, echoes the promise of the Old Testament, that God will gather us in, as a farmer gathers the harvest, and will share with us in a heavenly banquet - and again our minds cannot fully fathom what this means - more than caviar and pinot noir, certainly!!
How would you like to do all this yourself? Not only the task of constructing frogs and the habitat for them to live in, not only the task of looking after St Ursula's, but the task of looking after Almaz Tadesse as she scrapes a living from the soil in Ethiopia, after Hector Davie as he lies in bed dreaming, after Osama bin Laden, just in case he calls to you for help? And more besides.
Here, finally, is the point. We cannot "understand" everything that God does. In several ways, it is outside our range of experience, and if we try, we are bound to fail. But in Jesus we see what God does, for "in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Col 2:9). The baby in the manger, the one who made the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dumb speak, who multiplied the loaves and the fishes, who calmed the storm, who spoke of the now present kingly reign of God, was and is the one "through whom all things were made", and who came "for our salvation."
Jesus came to share our suffering existence. He went willingly to death for us, so that we can share in his death, in his conquest of sin - and his conquest of our own reluctance to accept God's will for us. And at Easter he rose again, to a new life outside our limited experience, to one which we can begin to understand if we share in the church's worship, but which we will never fully grasp until we meet him face to face.
May this Easter be a time for such a meeting.
HD