I was nine years old, sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor of our church basement.
Sister Shirley told us we had a really fun Bible story that morning. Noah and the ark.
I already knew enough about the story to like it. There was a huge boat, animals two by two, a dove carrying a branch and, eventually, a beautiful rainbow.
Sister Shirley told us the world had become terribly evil, so God decided to start over. Noah obeyed God, built the ark, gathered his family and the animals, and God shut the door.
Then the rain came.
In my imagination, I could see everything. The animals. The rising water. Noah and his family safely inside.
But then my mind added something Sister Shirley hadn’t mentioned. I heard pounding. Thud. Thud. Fists against the door of the ark.
Suddenly I understood something I had never considered before.
If Noah and his family were safely inside the ark, everybody else was outside.
And the door was locked.
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That realization changed the story for me.
Until then, Noah’s ark had belonged in the same category as so many other childhood Bible stories. It was filled with colorful pictures, a hero and a lesson at the end about how much God loved us.
But once I thought about the people outside the boat, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
What happened to the children? What happened to the babies? What had they done? What was their sin?
Then the most frightening question of all popped into my head. If God could become angry enough to do that to them, what kept Him from doing something terrible to me?
Those were scary questions for a nine-year-old. They were also questions I kept mostly to myself.
That’s the part of the story that interests me most today. Children often hear more than adults realize. An adult can hear a Bible story about judgment and then wrap it with theology and explanations accumulated over centuries.
A child doesn’t have any of that. A child hears, “God killed everybody.” Then the child tries to figure out what that tells him about God. I certainly did.
Sister Shirley eventually reached the happy ending. She showed us the rainbow and explained that it was God’s promise never to destroy the earth with a flood again.
Everyone seemed satisfied. I wasn’t.
The rainbow was pretty, but it couldn’t bring the millions of dead back to life.
For me, the rainbow didn’t erase the terrifying part of the story. In some ways it made the contradiction more obvious.
I was being told two things at once.
God loves you.
God can destroy you.
At nine years old, I didn’t know how to make those ideas live together. So I did what children often do. I became careful.
If God could become dangerously angry, then maybe my job was to make sure I never gave Him a reason to hurt me. Even at that young age I determined to be good, to obey. Don’t ask the wrong questions. Don’t get on the wrong side of the door.
Years later, I became a pastor. I spent decades talking about God, studying Scripture and trying to help other people believe that God loved them.
But the frightened boy in that church basement didn’t disappear just because the adult version of him learned theology.
That’s one of the things I’ve come to understand about religious fear. It doesn’t always present itself as fear. Sometimes it calls itself obedience. Or even holiness or faith.
For a long time, I thought being afraid of God meant I took God seriously. Today I’m not so sure. I also no longer think the answer to disturbing Bible stories is to pretend the disturbing parts aren’t there.
The nine-year-old boy sitting on that basement floor deserved something better than, “Don’t worry about that. Look at the pretty rainbow.”
He deserved permission to ask, Why? Or, What do I do when something I’ve been taught about God scares me?
Maybe some of our most important spiritual questions begin when we finally stop pretending that everything makes sense.
I still remember the rainbow from that Sunday School lesson.
But I also remember the water.
Maybe faith became more honest for me when I finally gave myself permission to look at both.
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