Lots of us have pictures of God in our wallet or on our refrigerator. They are drawings, not photographs. We have drawn them, sketched them really, from looking into our own concept of fairness or justice or compassion or significance. We have drawn them from our best remembrance of Vacation Bible School stories we heard when we were young. We have drawn them from the catechism we remember before our first communion. We have drawn them from the sermons we heard from the preacher who we adored and who subsequently ran away with the church secretary or the wife of the chairman of the deacons.

Some of these sketches are lovely. They are drawn in calm pastels, soothing, comforting. Some are incredibly lifelike, strangely resembling someone who had been very close to us, a parent, a friend, a child. Some are abstract, more suggestion of a form. Some are harsh, stark streaks of red and black.

We often don’t think about the picture, until someone talks about God or about one of the words that we culturally associate with God – church, gospel, commandment, obedience, Bible. Then we pull out our picture and say, “That’s not how I see God” or “the God I believe in would never.”

But what if each of our pictures is inadequate to capture all of who God is?

I admit that I work from a particular perspective. I acknowledge that I do my best to start drawing from the Bible. And I confess that people who start from the Bible have drawn incredibly sketchy pictures. Or pictures that look a lot like themselves. But what if we spent some time connecting our pictures back to the picture of God found there rather one we vaguely remember is there? At least we’d have a common starting point.