There You Are.

From my first memory, all my ideas about God were tied to punishment.

When you tell a first-grader at Vacation Bible School that if they want to go to heaven instead of hell they should repeat a prayer, that six-year-old is going to pray that prayer so fast. When you tell a third-grade Sunday School class to bring their missions offering or else the missionaries will have to come home and all the rural Chinese people will go to hell, she will bring her quarters. When you tell an eighth-grader that God is logging her every thought and she’ll account for them one day standing in front of him, she’ll become terrified of this watching God keeping a record of her ordinary humanity.