How do we learn about God?

My first lesson about God came on a quiet summer day on our short street in a new subdivison. I was young, probably in kindergarten, which made my little sister about 3.  We were in the driveway making mud pies after a morning rain.  The mud was dark and smooth like the chocolate batter we imagined it to be.  I tried to get Jennifer to eat one by pretending to do so myself.  She balked.  I pushed. She pushed back.  I smacked.  She cried and ran to mom.  I jumped on my tricycle and raced down the street.  If I could get around the corner she would not be able to see me.  The corner appeared and I was going way too fast.  Spin out.  Gravel.  Pain.  Tears.  The handle bar missing the rubber grip on its end had torn across my belly scrapping skin and drawing blood.  Leaving the tricycle in the grass, I ran home screaming.  Mom plopped me on top of the dryer as she tended the wounds with little sympathy.  Finally, all clean and bandaged, the lecture began. 

 Do you know why you were hurt?

 Yes, the rubber cap is missing on my bike.

 But do you know why you fell?

 Yes, I was going too fast at the corner.

 No, you got hurt because God was punishing you for hitting your little sister.  Now, go apologize to Jennifer and then clean up the mess out front.

 God.  Sitting in the sky.  Looking down and watching my every move.  Just waiting for me to screw up.  Just waiting for me to do the wrong thing.  Just waiting to zap me, punish me, and make me pay for my evil ways.

 So God was to be avoided, hid from, steered clear of, and so was my sister.

 Gradually, I grew up.  The country was divided over the Vietnam War.  Earth Day was established to help us focus on the environment.  Racial conflicts erupted in the city and the high school.  I wore wire-rim glasses and a floppy hat with my bellbottom jeans and Mrs. Mueller in World History called me the hippie.  My good friend hanged himself in his basement and I never had to ask why. Occasionally there was a vague sense of that long forgotten God up there watching me break the rules, but nobody else ever seemed to notice.

 One day Betty Ann asked if I wanted to go on a trip.  Her church youth group was going to visit mission sites in New Mexico and Arizona.  For two weeks away I would have gone anywhere.  Sign me up.

 That trip took me to heaven and introduced me to a different God. 

 Far from the city, up in the hills the collection of shacks was the only indication that life existed at that altitude.  Nothing came close to resembling the doctors’ offices I knew from home.  Barely diapered babies crawled across the dirty floor while sniffling, coughing, vomiting children filled the broken chairs that lined the walls.  From the exam room came the sounds of pain, the smells of illness and the sights of compassion.  A clinic, serving the poor and forgotten was a vision of hope in a world I believed no longer cared.

 Families, old men, young women unhurried gradually filled the pews.  At least “pew” is what they called the rough, hard planks balanced across the stumps.  The drums and guitars filled the log building with melodies of enjoyment.  Voices were raised in songs of delight.  Something was making it possible for these people to sing in their dreary surroundings, to praise in their needy circumstances, to find joy in a community that by all appearances was so depressed.  I could feel the presence of something making that joy possible, something I could not see and still did not understand.

 Stars filled the sky as we spread out sleeping bags on the abandoned ski slope.  People I did not even know 10 days earlier were now my friends and companions.  We shared questions, insights, dreams and fears.  The sense of being close to another person in a caring way was comfortable and inviting yet unfamiliar.  I felt others touching me, inside and out and began to understand how love feels.

 One by one, step by step, one experience after another, I was meeting God.

 A God who built hospitals on reservations.

A God who stood up against the war.

A God who created our world and wanted us to protect it.

A God who cared for people- even Native Americans- even children- even me.

A God who welcomed me wholeheartedly into a community of faith.

A God who picked me up off the path I was traveling and moved me to a new road, a road with meaning and purpose and hope and promise and a big bunch of people who knew my name and cared about me.

A God who saved me.