I have had a lot of interesting conversations with people recently. Most of them men and usually in the gym or sauna.

The conversations have been interesting for a number of reasons. For many years I have always felt I am not great at the smalltalk stuff that you need to chat generally. I still think that is the case, but I have been surprised to see that just a question, or one word, can often lead into a long, and quite general, conversation.

Some people I have been talking to for quite a while are clearly running away from a god of sorts. They are running away from the image of a god that they have been presented with. A image that, more often than not, is an inaccurate image presented by an organisation, a group of people, an individual or a church.

God has been presented as a god that demands the unreasonable, or as a god that wants everything to believe and act exactly the same, or as a god that looks in disgust at the mess we have got ourselves into, or as a god that disapproves of our lifestyle, or as a god that hates women, or as a god that hates homosexuals, or as a god that judges us for how we speak, or how we dress, or how we sound, or by the political party we vote for.

So many wrong images of God that people quite clearly are running from – and who could blame them? I would not wish to follow a God like that. Those images don’t think with the image of the God welcoming back the prodigal child.

My question which I find myself pondering on:

as these people run away from the wrong image of God, does that take them further away or closer to the true God?