About God:

My sister and I were raised as Missouri Synod Lutherans. This would be the stricter, more conservative kind of Lutheran. The choir sometimes sang in Latin or German. A descendant of Martin Luther once came to our church. We still did the old formal liturgy and chanting. Personal relationships with God weren't discussed much, that was sort of personal. Knowing the Ten Commandments and the Lutheran catechism was important, as was being confirmed in the Lutheran faith.

I did all that, but God just didn't seem very friendly to me. He was like this ominous father figure way far off who'd see everything did wrong and frown at it, see what you did right and sigh in disappointment that it wasn't better, and if things got really bad really quick, you might ask him for help, but he'd just watch and wait instead.

My dad had frequented more interesting born-again type churches over the years, but he was the church organist and director of music (as well as a teacher in the private Lutheran school we went to), so the Lutheran church was still home base. I'd been reading the little tracts he had boxes of for years- the "Chick tracts", and a lot of my perceptions of God were based on these tracts. He was always depicted as faceless and impossibly large, remote. The converts were always very, very emotional and filled with joy, tears running down their faces. People who didn't convert in time endured unspeakable torment by sadistic demons. The solution to avoiding hell was to say the sinner's prayer, where you ask Jesus into your heart and admit that you're a sinner and you're sorry. I did it several times as a child, but nothing felt different afterwards even though I was quite sincere.

My mother's rendition of God was quite a bit different.....