What if the God you were taught to fear is still shaping the way you see other people?
I often think about the moment, now more than six decades ago, when I opened our family Bible and saw God staring back at me.
It terrified me.
He stood on the clouds with a scowl on His face. But it was His eyes that made me tremble. Lightning bolts shot from them, and in my young mind, they seemed aimed directly at me.
No wonder I slammed the cover shut and ran for cover.
For years, I thought the damage from that picture was mostly personal. It made me afraid of God.
I was wrong.
It took me decades to understand the greater danger.
A frightening picture of God does more than frighten the person who believes it. When we become convinced that God looks at certain people with anger, disgust, or condemnation, sooner or later we may begin looking at them the same way.
Once we believe God has rejected someone, it becomes much easier for us to reject them too.
We exclude.
We shame.
We point fingers.
We decide who belongs and who does not.
That realization eventually found its way into A God Awful God:
“The lightning had not stayed inside the picture. We had learned to aim it at people.”
Who did your church teach you God was angry with?
Who were you warned about?
Who was described as dangerous, sinful, rebellious, deceived, or outside the reach of God’s love?
In my story, one of the groups eventually caught in that lightning was the LGBTQ community. But the pattern is much larger than one issue.
Churches have aimed it at doubters, divorced people, women who would not stay in their assigned roles, people who left the church, people who asked forbidden questions, and anyone who made certainty uncomfortable.
Maybe the important question is not only, “What do I believe about God?”
Maybe it is also, “What kind of person is my picture of God teaching me to become?”
A God Awful God is the story of how my picture of God changed and what happened when that change began rearranging the way I saw other people.
The manuscript is now finished and moving into production.
If you’d like to follow the journey from finished manuscript to published book, behind-the-scenes updates, and occasional excerpts I haven’t shared publicly, please an join my email list below.
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