I’ve never been scared of thunderstorms. Startled, maybe, but I don’t remember ever not liking them. They make me feel very small and very safe. They have an uncanny ability to evoke both euphoria and comfort in me.

When I was quite little, I remember sitting in my sister’s lap in the playroom during a thunderstorm, despite the fact that she was a very small third grader who was barely bigger than me. She told me that thunder was God bowling. Naturally, that prompted me to ask what God looked like – I was picturing a heavenly game of bowling and it was quite difficult when I didn’t know what He looked like. My eight year old sister told me that God had rainbow hair. He was half boy and half girl and his face was all different colors depending on the day.

I was satisfied with that answer and went on imagining God kicking ass at some celestial Main Event.

I’ve never wavered on my opinions regarding thunderstorms. I wish I could say the same about my opinions on God. I identify as Catholic and I have a certain affection for the Catholic tradition that hasn’t really changed. But I’ve always been ambivilant at best about God in the literal sense. I bet that’s not something you hear every day – a Catholic who doesn’t know if she believes in God.

I fully acknowlege that organized religion is not for everyone – spirituality as a concept is complicated. My experience of spirituality is through the Catholic and Christian traditions, but that’s by no means the only way to do it. As I reference “God” henceforth, feel free to substitute whatever sense of spiritual being you want.

I think a lot of why so many people including myself struggle to connect to God as a literal figure is because we don’t see him as a figure that could possibly understand what we are going through. If God is the white man, how could he understand the baseline anxiety I have of sexual assault as a woman? How could he understand what I feel when I walk into a McDonalds in the deep South as a person of color? If I don’t believe that this white, male God knows what I am going through, how am I supposed to trust a white male god as my source of refuge?

God, I’ve been told, knows my heart. He does not only know my fears and joys and sorrows – he shares in them. That’s a powerful sentiment if we can connect to it. If I believe in a god that shares everything that I feel, then it is not so much of a stretch to imagine Him as a source of refuge. The question we have to ask, therefore, is how we get to feeling like God can understand what we are going through.

After all, wasn’t that the whole point of Jesus being human? The idea that God feels the same pain and temptation that we feel, and yet, was sinless? I’m trying to believe that God understands what I feel, what all of us feel, but it’s difficult. So how do we reconcile that man from our illustrated bibles with the God that is the ultimate guide, friend, and father?

My solution is a little unorthodox, but I’m asking you to bear with me until I finish. I propose that we think a little more like my sister at eight years old. Maybe we start thinking of God of this genderfluid, rainbow-haired, multi-ethnic figure, not because that’s some sort of historically accurate depiction of Jesus, but because it might help all of us connect to God a little more. Over a decade ago, my sister decided that God looked like all of us, and I think that is deeply moving.

Fourteen years later, I’m trying to return to that kind of innocence and that kind of belief in God as someone who doesn’t just understand my fears as a woman, but shares in my fears as a woman. If I need to picture God as something other than a white man in order to believe that, I have confidence that He will not mind.

In adopting my sister’s view of God, I’m trying to believe in a god who shares in the joy of the students on graduation day; a god who shares in the injustice done to the African American community; a god who shares in the elation of the LGBTQ community upon the SCOTUS decision in June; a god who shares in the profound loss of the Syrian refugees.

I’m choosing to believe in a god who knows how I feel in a thunderstorm. And I’m choosing to believe that everything about God is what I feel when the first drops start to fall.

Comforted. Euphoric. Safe.