Letting Go of Your Picture of God
- Gregory Loewen
- Aug 14
- 3 min read
We all carry an image of what “God” is supposed to be.
Maybe it comes from childhood stories, sacred texts, or something we pieced together over the years.
But here’s the thing: the God I picture will never look exactly like the God you picture. And the God ancient writers described? That was their God—the one they experienced through their own time, culture, and personal lens. Do you really think that a blue-eyed man from the Middle East looked Caucasian? According to most Westernized accounts, he was, as he was transformed into their own image.
Across the world, people have imagined God in countless ways.
In India alone, there are thousands of gods—Shiva the destroyer, Lakshmi the giver of abundance, Ganesha the remover of obstacles, Kali the fierce mother. Each reflects qualities people value or long for.
It’s not just India. Ancient Greece, Egypt, Africa, the Americas, and the Norse lands all created their own gods and goddesses—each shaped by the land, the culture, and the dreams of the people.
Why so many? Because the divine is infinite, and our human minds make it relatable by giving it a face, a name, and a story. Every god we imagine is a mirror—reflecting our hopes, fears, and deepest qualities back to us.
I believe the clearest image of God isn’t somewhere “out there” at all—it’s alive within each of us. The divine you experience is your God, shaped by your heart, your life, and the way you see the world. The divine I experience will be shaped by mine.
It’s not something that needs a fixed face or a name—it’s a presence, a feeling, a living truth that doesn’t depend on identity or appearance.
Belief, however, can sometimes get in the way.
When we decide in advance what the divine must look like, we narrow our vision. We scan the horizon for our imagined form and overlook what’s already here. The real thing may be standing right in front of us, but we can’t see it—because we’re only looking for our idea of it.
This is where faith is different.
Faith isn’t clinging to a perfect mental image; it’s trusting in what is real, even when it has no form you can see. You can’t see love the way you see a tree or a chair, but you know it’s real because you feel it, live it, and witness its effects. The divine is like that—experienced in kindness, connection, joy, and awe.
When we loosen our grip on what we think the divine should look like, we make room to meet it as it truly is—wilder, quieter, stranger, or more loving than we ever imagined. We begin to notice its reflection in every person, every culture, every moment. Faith without a fixed picture is stronger than faith bound to an image—because it’s tied to something alive within you, something no one can take away.
When we see the divine as something alive within us—bigger than any single image or story—we stop chasing it “out there” and start noticing it everywhere. In every culture’s god, in every person we meet, and in every unexpected twist of life, the same light is looking back at us. That light doesn’t depend on circumstances to shine. And when we trust it—when we live from it—we discover a happiness that isn’t fragile or conditional. It’s the kind of unreasonable happiness that comes from knowing the divine is already here, in us, no matter what the world looks like today.
Ever evolving,
Gregory
The Church of Unreasonable Happiness
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