What’s your mental picture of God?
Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen teaches a class on the relationship between faith and the social sciences. She has students go out and talk to children about their views of God.
One student reported: “A grade school child I talked to said, ‘God is like my principal.’ I immediately thought, ‘How sad that this child thinks of God as the final enforcer of rules.’ But the child continued, ‘She [the principal] goes around the schoolyard at recess, making sure everyone gets a chance to play.”
How beautiful! A school principal as the image of a God whose concern for justice and fairness makes life enjoyable play for everyone. What a far cry from the picture drawn of the dreaded headmaster in Jane Eyre, always eager to humiliate kids into absolute subjection.
With three kids of my own, I have witnessed the hospitality and justice work of principals in our community. They welcome children out front each morning, calling them by name. Kids enter the laboratory of learning through the sanctuary door of their open arms.
The principals I know don’t hide in their offices with paddles in hand, waiting for bad children to be sent their way. Neither do they shirk the role of rule enforcers, because they know that discipline is the best friend of virtue and freedom. But they much prefer to celebrate good character than to modify bad behavior.
A principal is a good image for God. Both have to know how to hold together demand and grace, high expectations and wide mercy, a firm hand and a soft heart. Principals are authority figures to be respected and role models to be resembled.
This wedding of opposites is the full picture of God that does us good all the days of our lives. If you see God as an unbending taskmaster who keeps your grades in a secret book and will post them for all to see, your partial view distorts the full. If you see God as a sentimental grandparent who gives you candy and never questions your act, you equally miss the mark of a God whose love and holiness reinforce one another.
God can have fire in the belly over all things in the world and in us that destroy life and love and community, and at the same time be forgiving and blessing. Parents who practice tough love know this is possible, just as patriots who practice civil disobedience.
When you drop your kid off at school this month and see the principal on duty, let your mind drift to the God who guards and keeps you in faithful love.
