What shape is your God box?

This time last year we spent a month in a small lakeside town a few miles south of Kathmandu. It was a quiet town but like most quiet towns, Pokhara had its share of drama. The most significant, during our stay, concerned several young Hindu girls who had to be taken to the local hospital after swooning and fainting as the result of an intense religious experience during a school retreat.

Nothing unusual about that, you might say, and you'd be right.

Young girls have been fainting and swooning for just about as long as God has been revealing Him/Herself to mankind. My point is that no matter what our cultural background or social world view is, if we are genuinely looking for God, He will reveal Himself to us, no matter in what context we interpret or perceive Him.

This has certainly been my experience in sharing Ramadan with my Muslim brothers and sisters this year. To my delight I've discovered God where I least expected to find him.

A friend who worked as a radio broadcaster in the days when it was call "The Wireless" said that radio is its own wardrobe mistress. By this he meant that because the medium was non visual, each listener was forced to imagine for themselves how each of the characters looked, thereby making each character unique to each listener.

If this is so, then why couldn't the same parallel be used to describe God, whom many of us have experienced, but none of us has seen.

Could it be that we simply interpret God as either Christian, Jewish Muslim etc according to our own cultural predisposition?

David du Plessis, a respected Pentecostal world leader and advisor to Pope John Paul II's Ecumenical Council in the 1980s was sent to Madgegoria to report on the sighting by several young children of the Virgin Mary.

In his report David said that whilst he personally had no paradigm to understand or interpret their religious experience in the terms they used, he had no doubt whatsoever that they had all had an intense personal encounter with the Living God, and quoted Jesus' own words

"By their fruits shall you know them".

Perhaps God is more interested in the fact that we respond to His initiative rather than the shape of the box we put Him in.