I first met God on a Wednesday afternoon.
I was sitting under the bleachers in track spikes and too many layers, and that was when They
came to me. They were less of an entity and more of an energy, a warmth in the air and a sense
of peace enveloping my compartment of the world. I knew that They were with me as certainly
as I knew I was alive. I’m pretty sure, now, that They always are, but there’s something magical
about knowing for sure.
God has since come to me in crowded hallways, radiating tracks, too-loud bleachers, and
college dorms.
I was baptized Presbyterian and have attended some sort of church since then. Spirituality was
never cruel to me. It held my small body in nurturing arms and gave me a cushion to fall back
on. I was given love and promises of eternal care without a single thing being asked of me.
I mostly only had good experiences, and the misfortunes didn’t take away from my faith. I was
told that God was for the vagabonds, for the outcasts and broken-hearted. For the ones that
other people’s god called wrong. God was for everyone, but especially those who needed
Them.
Being queer didn’t make me a sinner. Being queer made me holy.
I lost count of the amount of times God spoke to me. It was at least the fifth or sixth time when
They sat down beside me at a fireside, Their silence like a song in the evening light.
“Why do you think that you’re a mistake of mine?” They ask, and I don’t make eye-contact. “Why
do you believe I’m capable of anything but love?”
“I don’t, not really,” I answer. “All my mistakes are my own. It’s not your fault you couldn’t
foresee what I’d do.”
“My darling, of course I could foresee what you would do,” God laughs. “Time is something I’m
above. I’m everything you’ve ever done, and everything you’ll ever do. I am you, and I am
everyone who loves you. I am everyone you’ve ever loved.”
“I don’t doubt that you love me,” I insist. “I know I can be loved. I even love myself a lot of the
time. I try to love everyone as much as you do. I just worry that I’m failing you.”
“Who told you that it was possible to fail me?” God begs. “Morality is a human concept. You owe
nothing to me, or to the world. You love because you want to. You speak to me because you like
to believe I’m here.”
“I guess I don’t believe any of my own misgivings,” I confess to Them. “You have been nothing
but kind to me.”

“I am what you make of me,” God says. “I am the love your mother gives you, and the awe of a
stranger who hears you share oddities to a room of skeptics. I am the grateful midnight phone
calls from a lifelong friend and I’m the classmates who look forward to your presentations. I’m
there even when you don’t feel me. Don’t you see?”
“Yes,” I tell Them, and I mean it. “Love is everywhere, isn’t it?”
“Yes!” God claps Their hands, and I smile. “And love will find you as you are. Your peculiarities;
your mistakes. Your smiles at an empty room. Love will find you as you dye your hair and
change your name. Love will find you when you fall apart.”
“Even in a world that hates me for existing? Even when I forget to try my hardest, and I can’t get
anything right?”
“Look around you,” God instructs, and I do. “Does this look like a world that hates you? Like a
world that gives you no room to grow? The world isn’t a collective, my lovely. The world ebbs
and flows but I will always be here, shining sun onto your leaves and pouring water on your
roots. Love will find you. Love has already found you, exactly where you are.”
“Thank you,” I say, my chest expanding until it fills the entire sky. Strings tie me to every single
being on this godly plain, and I’ve never felt so alive as when the whole world’s heart beats in
mine. “I think I needed to hear that.”
“Don’t thank me,” God says with a smile. “I am only what you make of me.”
I look up from the fire. A pastor is playing a song on his guitar, and kids are making s’mores. My
fingers are slightly too cold but my face is blushingly warm. There are tears in the corners of my
eyes and I am weightless, even as my bones grind against the thankless seat of my chair. All of
our hearts beat as one and I know, for sure, that I’m supposed to be here.
Somewhere inside of me, someone is crying.
I’ve never been a fire and brimstone type Christian. My dad’s parents are fundamentalists, and
make me wonder why they love their god at all. I don’t think I could unconditionally love a god
whose love was conditional. I can’t imagine it’s very fun to live in fear of torment of celestial
making.
My fists clench and I have to swallow my emotions when people use God as an excuse to hate.
When crosses decorate picket signs and prayer spills from the mouths of those tearing my body
apart. Love itself is not a weapon unless corrupted, held in fire and hammered into something
entirely new. They craft knives, axes, swords. Guns. How can something so easily melded be
something to trust at all?

How can someone see something as beautiful as divinity, and have their first reaction be fear?
Their first instinct violence? Their mission be forcing others to perceive the intangible in the
same way as them? My dear, no one hears God’s message the same. That’s what makes it
beautiful.
You can’t tie God into a noose.
“God hates me,” I declare to my friends, after a concert I was to attend gets canceled. My friend
furrows his brow in concern.
“God doesn’t hate you,” he assures me, and I crack a smile.
“Yeah, I know. God and I go way back,” I tell him. “God and I are besties.”
“Aren’t you gay?” another friend asks. His tone is teasing, and I’m certain he doesn’t mean the
question seriously. I have a difficult time not biting down too hard on my bottom lip anyway.
“Yep,” I tell him. “God and I are totally gay for each other.”
My queer friends have an easy time misunderstanding. It’s not their fault they’ve been burned by
a vengeful god’s hellfire. Not their fault that they’ve been told God is black and white.
The divine is even less quantifiable than you are, I tell them. God is what you make of Them.
People who see God made into guns make God into nothing at all. You can’t be hurt by bullets
that aren’t real. They just pass harmlessly through your skin like the empty threats they are.
My friends hear me speak God’s name and reach for their bulletproof vests. That’s not their fault
any more than it is mine. They don’t know my God is a warm bed.
“Does it bother you,” I ask God, while lying in the grass and staring at the sky. “Does it bother
you how people use your image to set the world ablaze?”
“I don’t think that matters,” God answers. “What matters is that it bothers you.”
“It must hurt, to be twisted into a representation of all that’s wrong with the world,” I say, and
They shrug.
“You know what I am no better than any of them. I’m what’s wrong with the world as much as
what’s right. You can’t pick and choose.”
“I know, I know, but—it just must be difficult, when people who don’t know you claim to speak for
you, portraying you as angry and ugly when you are so, incredibly beautiful.”
“What makes me beautiful besides a reflection of you?”

“I don’t make you out of nothing. I see love in the world and feel a tenderness between
humanity. I observe a world full of beauty and I feel it in you.”
“I guess you could say all of that.”
“Yeah, so, so—isn’t it difficult to be misrepresented so drastically?”
“Yes, I suppose it’s difficult. It’s difficult to have people look to me to save them when all I can
offer them is the vaguest of guidance. When all the love in the world can’t combat all that’s
against it. People ask me to save lives when I have no say over disease, no working over war or
storm. I can’t save you, I can only help you to save yourselves.”
“I could never be God,” I sigh, and God laughs.
“You really think you couldn’t be God?” God asks me, and I nod slowly.
“I couldn’t handle all the expectations. I couldn’t handle being molded into infinitely many
shapes. I couldn’t handle seeing everything but not being able to do anything. I could never
handle being God.”
There is a long, long pause.
“Neither could I,” God admits, and I blink up at the cloudless sky.
I go to church on Sunday, and I don’t speak on my conversation with God. I talk instead of
beauty in my life and hardships in my wake, but I think I got the point across.
God holds my hand, and I slip into fitless sleep.