After a recent trip to the grocery store with my husband, my daughter arrived home with a new book: Where's God when I'm Scared. Mark wanted to treat her for helping him with the shopping, and books are always a good thing, right? He let her pick this book, which she judged by its colorful monster-filled cover to be good and which he didn't give much scrutiny.As my daughter pleaded with me to read it to her on her arrival home, I raised one eyebrow at my husband, who said apologetically, "I really didn't look at it before I bought it." Bringing a generic grocery store God book into my house was bringing the generic God of my childhood into the house, a God I no longer believed in or wanted in my life. I felt like my child's mind was about to be warped with false propaganda; the friendly, colorful pages of this book were going to feed her a candy coated version of lies. I knew from the title of the book alone that the protagonist and I were going to differ on God as much as a human can differ with a piece of asparagus in a baseball hat.
I opened the book and started reading about a scared little piece of asparagus who is visited in the night by a magical tomato and maybe an eggplant. (I've hidden the book so effectively that now I can't find it to check.) The magical tomato and eggplant tell the asparagus there is no need to be scared because God is with him and is bigger than any monster, bigger than King Kong or Godzilla or the Slime Monster. And God made all the stars, which makes Him much more bad ass than those monsters anyway.
As with any book reading session with a four-year-old, I was immediately hit by a barrage of questions. "Is that God?" my daughter asked, pointing at a picture of what was supposed to be King Kong.
"No, that's King Kong."
"Who's King Kong."
"King Kong is a really giant ape in a story."
"Then where's God?"
"God's not in this book."
"Well, what does he look like?"
"God... Well, first of all, some people like to call God a he, but God doesn't have to be a he." (Mark, somewhere in the kitchen, calls out to express his own dislike for calling God "He" and his continuing regret for buying the book.)
"I think God is a she then," says my daughter.
"Well, yes, God could be a she, but God... Hm... Some people think of God like a person and call God he or she like a person. And some people think of God as outside us -- and they think God can control things and did things like make the stars. But that's not what Mama and Daddy believe... Um..." I'm hopelessly lost at this point, when Mark pops in from the kitchen to save me.
"Sweetheart," he says to our daughter, "I want you to know that a lot of people, including Mama and Daddy, believe that God is very important and that having God in our lives helps us live."
Whew! There I was struggling to articulate what God is not. That book made me feel I needed to build up a picture of the God I grew up with, tear it down and build up the God I know today. I thanked my husband and made a mental note to talk to the kids about what I do believe and not what I don't, as my daughter, distracted by Daddy's appearance, ran off to play with something else.
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