What Does God Look Like? (The Power of Story)

Children are full of questions, but it’s usually the five-year-old boy who asks this one. You know the kid. He'll be running around the place with his toy plane, swishing it around and making noise. Then all of a sudden he'll turn to you and ask, "What does God look like?"

And there you stand.

Adults don’t ask such questions. They don’t have the time for such things. Also there are the problems of the physical describing the spiritual, the finite understanding the infinite, in short, the creation comprehending the creator.

But even in the adult world, the question remains. It’s haunting and demands an answer. What does God look like?

When Jesus walked the face of the earth, he actually addressed this issue. No, he never told us what God looked like; instead he showed us. And he used the power of story to do so.

So what’s the answer?

God looks like a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to search high and low for a lost lamb (Luke 15:4-7), then calls all to rejoice when it is found. God looks like a king who forgave an unbelievable debt, one impossible to repay, just for the asking (Matt 18:23-35). God looks like a rich landowner who showed grace when he paid his vineyard workers at the end of the day (Matt 20:1:16). Or how about this? God looks like dad, running towards his stinking son, a boy dressed in rags and smelling like pigs (Luke 15:11-32).

When we read these stories what do we read? Well we may read a story about a dignified father running, hugging, and kissing his filthy son, but we are shown a stunning picture of our heavenly father.

Though these images are not photographically clear, the stories of Jesus have provided us, as through a dark or dim glass, a picture of the face of God. Only story has this power to communicate the infinite to the finite, the holy to the sinful, and truth into a hard heart.

So what does God look like? Is the question really important?

The question is extremely important, for in the quest to seek its answer will reside the meaning of life. And that is very important to the five-year-old who lives within all of us.

Originally posted February 2014

Bloopers, College Style

We all make mistakes. We all have slips of the tongue, or sometimes fingers on the keyboard. Online college students who are taking a religion class are no exception.  The following are some that have crossed my computer screen over the years, copied as they originally appeared.

From submitted papers

I’m thankful for the freedoms I have and the ability to cast a vote at the expense of others.

Abraham was a true and firm believer of God and his covenant was so important because God fulfilled his life and the life of his family, giving them so many blessings before his crucifixion.

Since evolutionary forces is the product of mankind, and not Gods creation it makes the ambiguous man real purpose.

Jesus was born during the error of Herod the great.

In the sixth century it is said to believe Jesus the holy son of God was born to a virgin by the name of Mary and David her husband, in the land of Bethlehem.

Luke also identifies that, Caesar Augustus made Mary and Jospeh vacate their house Nazareth and move to the house of Joseph’s antecedents.  This new place was the hosue of David.  The new house was too small, which forced Jesus to sleep in the manger.

The Pastor feels that the bible is the expired Word of God.

Unlike my religion which is Christianity, the Islam religion has its own set of beliefs.

During the concept, distribution and explanation of this paper will be explaining about the religions that I have done some extensive research and examined its meaning.

Is there a way to fix errors after submitting, your Discussion Board? I have tried on several threads, but it just wants me to write it all over again. It is bad enough that since Microsoft went into my computer, it does not work very well.

The crusades are another event that was led by Constantine in the fourth century to conquer battle for religious freedoms to break free from Roman influence.

The Jew made up over a third of the Jewish people in the world and half of the Jews in Europe.

It’s told in the bible; which is the Christians holy book of God that Jesus would be born on a Holy day, born of a virgin and could be found in the City of Bethlehem by following the North star.

Christianity has about 2 billion members worldwide with 159 billion in the United States …

When complaining about a grade

I worked really hard on this this paper. I didn't even know we had to write it like a legit paper.

From posted personal biographies

I hit half decade mark do not feel any older.

Iam married for thirty years, we have three wonderful children. One daughter married two sons in the service …

Hello, my name is ________, and I am glad to back in class again.   I have five children, three girls and one son.

From describing a church visit

Directly across from the church is a very well kept community cemetery.  It provides a non-restrictive seating area for the congregation, a complete band, and space enough for praise dancers.

As I was waiting for the person that I was interviewing I did also see that the people that were involved for in this language were definitely a person a middle eastern decent with a second guessing at all.

[This church] is one of the smallest churches in the Napa valley, you could tell it had been around for a while, but when you enter the church the response from the members was completely infighting.

So as we chuckle over some of these comments, let us be all the more ready to chuckle at our own bloopers when we make them.

Papa and the Dump Truck

So what’s a college professor doing driving a dump truck?

One of my boys needed help.

We were at the diggins, the boy’s new house, and we needed to move dirt from the back of the poured foundation to the front of the property. To do this we used a skid loader and a dump truck, with the skid loader operator, the boy, being the more skilled of the two operators. After all, he had once picked up a quarter with a skid loader, or so he said.

Of course it rained the night before, so you had to overlook some of the puddles and slop, lest you spend the rest of the day in them; kinda like life. So the boy mixed dry dirt with the slop so we could work with it, though this created more work and everything seemed to move slowly.

Well the grays lowered and then turned into a mist. This made everything slick, which in turn made moving dirt even more difficult. But it wasn’t really all that bad, and in the end I only got the dump truck stuck once.

In time the mist stopped and the day lightened up and we began rolling with efficiency. The skilled operator explained how he wanted dirt dumped within six inches of a specific spot. After all that’s understandable, that was his skill level. But the college professor’s skill level was more like, “Thank you Jesus, we got this dumped in the correct county.” But the skid loader operator didn’t mind because that’s why God made skid loaders, to move dirt. Least that's what Papa said, and the boy agreed. So that’s just what we did, move dirt. As an aside, the dump truck driver actually did a pretty good job, a pretty good job indeed. Even the boy said so.

So what’s a college professor doing driving a dump truck?

Helping his boy, of course.

Remembering the Old Days

Well we had the grandkids over the other day, and the little boy was with them. You remember the one; we used to watch him before he was old enough to go to school. But we don’t watch him anymore since he is now grown up and in the second grade.

Well the two of us sat at our table in the kitchen and remembered the old days, when we use to sit there in the mornings. We talked about how grandma would bring us breakfast. We sometimes had hash browns and bacon, sometimes pancakes. We remembered how we talked about things and had a good time. We remembered too how wonderful the breakfasts were.

And there were other things that reminded us of the past. Like later that day when we fed the cats and took trash down to the road, just like we did in the old days. He then asked about Smokey, and I explained how that cat ran off. He then picked up a rock to throw in the pond, but I told him he probably shouldn’t do that. After all, his aunt would get mad because she didn’t get to throw rocks in the pond when she was little. He reminded me how he used to, back in the old days, so I said one would be okay.

We talked about other things too, about kicking through the leaves in October, and stomping around in the snow, and how we would get the mail every day. I told him how Papa enjoyed having him around, but I didn’t say anything about missing him. I didn’t want him to feel bad, now that he has grown up and all. After all, growing up is the way of life. It’s just that it happens so fast.

Well we had the grandkids over the other day, and I spent some time with the boy. Kinda reminded me of the old days.

Miss Stuver, Doc Savage, and the Make-Believe World of Literature

            Nancy Stuver was a young woman recently out of college when I met her over 45 years ago. This rather timid woman was my high school English teacher. Her job was to teach us American literature.

            In those days I was withdrawn and difficult, a troubled kid with a crappy attitude whose personal life had exploded into chaos. I didn’t particularly like reading, certainly not the horrid books Miss Stuver wanted us to read. I would merely skim a few pages and bluff the rest, just enough to get by. The poor woman didn’t know how to handle me.

            But ironically at that time, I was reading Doc Savage. Doc was the Man of Bronze, the superhero who righted wrongs and punished evildoers. Written mostly in the 1930s by Lester Dent (Kenneth Robeson), Doc and his five aids (headquartered in New York City), sought adventure in a world of dirigibles, autogyros, and automobiles with running boards and starter switches that you needed to step on to engage the engines. In Doc’s world, criminals could be converted by a simple operation, heroes could be beaten senseless without lasting consequences, and good guys always won. During my high school years, Bantam Books reprinted these adventures at the rate of one a month.

            But something happened as I escaped into the world of Doc. In fact, what happened was the same thing that eventually killed the original series. Reality.

            World War II arrived, and Doc’s successes against horrid villains who threatened to destroy the world seemed insignificant to the reader, now enmeshed in the horrors of fascism and war. Doc Savage Magazine underwent some changes in those years but finally stopped in 1949. The escape world of Clark Savage Jr. could not survive in the real world. In fact, Doc’s world seemed hollow when even compared to my own troubled world.

            So what does all of this have to do with Nancy Stuver? Her patient persistence changed things. Huckleberry Finn was the first book forced upon us that I actually read; in fact I was taken by it. And though still a make-believe world, this one was different. This book told an adventure of a troubled kid and a runaway slave floating down the Mississippi River, and a Colonel who stopped the lynch mob who came after him, and a feud that generated serious consequences. In Twain’s make-believe world, I saw something about life that was indeed real and important.

            So I read the other books that she offered: The Red Badge of Courage, The Great Gatsby, A Separate Peace, plus other books that today I don’t recall. And somehow in all of this, I understood that stories needed to be more than just taking us into a make-believe world. This make-believe world needed to show us something about life, and if the book is really good, something about ourselves. These make-believe stories were not threatened by reality, but rather taught us something about it.

            So what would I say to Miss Stuver if we met today after all of these years? Would we talk about a runaway slave named Jim? Or perhaps Doc and his friends?

Probably not.

I might tell her that I’ve had three books published, and if she remembers me at all she’d be stunned.

            But what I think I’d like to say would simply be, “Thanks, Nancy.”