Periodic Reflections on the Love of God
Edition 1: Volume 3

February 11, 2010

How long will grown men and women in this world keep drawing in their coloring books an image of God that makes them sad? – Meister Eckhart

I’m not a big fan of coloring books for children, the ones with the thick black outlines with the white space between them that all but demands where the child will color and what color they will use. There’s no room for the preschool artist to create and dream. A bold outline of a pony filling the page leaves no space for the child who imagines space ships and dragons to bring them to life on paper. The excited new owner of a freshly-opened green and yellow 64 count box of crayons is discouraged from taking all those amazing shades of purple and blue out for a test run when the perfectly shaped stemmed apple limits their choice to red and green. Give a kid a coloring book and you know what you’re going to get but give them a blank sheet of paper and a box of still-pointy crayons and anything is possible. The greatest treasures I’ve been given over the years have come from children, made of cheap recycled newsprint and adorned with drawings of a smiling Jesus with big buck teeth, a wax colored masterpiece of me holding the stick figure hand of the artist who drew it, and pile upon pile of papers covered in rainbows, floating hearts, and sun rays breaking through billowing clouds outlined in cotton candy pink or denim blue. Forget the Guggenheim in New York and the Uffizi in Florence. The most stunning works of art in all the world are hanging just down the street on your neighbor’s refrigerator.

For some of us our faith began as a coloring book we were given as children, pages already imprinted with lines that told us who God was and all that God wanted and expected and demanded of us. Sure, God is love but God also requires. Don’t forget that God loves you just as you are but don’t forget that God also wants you to change. Oh yes, God loves everyone equally but at the same time God consigns that a large number of these everyone’s will spend eternity in hell’s torment.

Leave this space blank. Fill in this space here. Stay inside the lines. Use this color because no other color will do; every other color is wrong. You might as well trade in your box of 64-count crayons for one black crayon and one white crayon; those two over-used crayon nubs at the bottom of the box. No other colors need apply.

When you go through life with a coloring book filled with bold simple static outlines of God there’s no reason to imagine a God beyond the lines. There’s no motivation to dream of something outside and beyond the cardstock cover, and even when we break free and dare to imagine a God who lives and breathes and loves outside the lines, the lines are still there, etched even deeper in our hearts than on the printed page. It would be easier to erase the permanent ink lines printed in a child’s coloring book than it would be to erase the images of God that have followed us, and often haunted us, through our lives. A God of conditions and expectations, a black-robed judge who swings a mean gavel, an unpredictable God of contradictions who demanded the full-scale annihilation of the heathen while providing a means of salvation for all creation.

There are few things more tragically poignant to me than when someone is haunted by their image of God; when the very thought of God passing through their mind causes them fear and sadness or to be hit with nauseating icy bouts of guilt and shame; when talk of God’s love makes them feel as though they are the sole exception from receiving such a thing. I hear it all the time. All the time. I want to believe what you’re saying. I want to believe God loves me. I want to believe God delights in me. I want to believe that who I am is who God has created me to be. But I can’t. I’m afraid God is judging me. I’m afraid of failing God. I’m afraid of what God will do. I’m afraid of going to hell.

That unidentified sound you just heard in the distance was God’s heart breaking accented by my gut wrenching.

All I can think to do is offer you one small suggestion to consider and it goes like this….if your image of God causes you to fear, if the idea of God looking on you makes you feel like a failure, or if there’s even the smallest hint of a doubt that you are being tenderly held this very minute in the love of God, then please, just consider trading in that old battered coloring book you’ve been carting around all your life for a blank canvas and a bottomless multi-tiered box of crayons. Close your eyes. Dream of how big love really is when conceived and held in the heart of God. Imagine a God who dances in delight at the sound of your name. Envision the God of Christ; a gentle shepherd, a compassionate father, a woman giddy at having found her one lost coin. Try to put a picture to unconditional love, unending mercy, and the wonder of divine grace.

And once you see the picture, every a blurry shadow of it, grab a crayon and draw….and draw….and draw.

Oh, in case I failed to mention, the black crayon and white crayon are missing from your box.  I took them and you can’t have them back. Ever.

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