Ask a philosopher or theologian, "Who is God?" and he or she will use words like incorporeality, omnipotence, omniscience, or omnipresence.

Ask Jesus, "Who is God?" and he will likely answer, "God is like" and then point you to something in the created world. Or he’ll tell a short story with clues about God in one of the characters.

There, one step from eternity, I was held back by the beauty of the natural world around me. If there could be such beauty even in winter, surely there had to be some answer to my questions besides meaninglessness. I walked back to the bus stop and returned to the university determined to keep looking.