I’m the last person who ought to be writing about God. Truth told, I can’t even tell you what I believe about him. I have all sorts of ideas. Some are ridiculous, others are flat-out absurd.

As a boy, I thought God would be a much taller version of John Wayne, with that forward-leaning walk. When I was older, I envisioned Bob Feller, or Bear Bryant maybe.

My Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Reginald—whose beehive hairdo was tall enough to register on most air-traffic radars—had her own thoughts on God. “He’s all-knowing,” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “And he KNOWS who put those frogs in the girl’s restroom toilets.”

Maybe he did, but it wasn’t Bobby, Robert, and me.

We put them in the sinks.

I once visited a friend in addiction rehab. There, I met a man who believed God was peace.

“I was a restless teenager,” he said. “That’s how my bad habits started. I was looking for a little peace.”

Then there’s my friend Jim, who raised horses in middle Alabama. He believed God was a horse-lover. “There ain’t no such thing as a mean horse-person,” he said. “It’s impossible to love horses and be evil.”

In a nursing home, an elderly Mississippi woman once told me her beliefs of God.

“When I’s a kid,” she said. “All our daddies would finish field work for the week, the owner of the nearest farm threw little parties every Friday evening. Folks got dressed up, fried fish, danced together, it was WON-da-full.”

Every Friday? Times have changed.

She went on, “The owner of that farm wore a white shirt and white pants at every get-together, it always reminded me of God.”

I could think of worse things than eating fried fish alongside the Almighty.

Anyway, I don’t suppose any of this matters, since no one knows all there is to know about God. Maybe he does ride horseback, wear white, or fry hushpuppies at a farm in the sky. But I don’t believe God is relaxing in a far off place.

What about the immigrant workers, suffering heatstroke? Or the young man going through withdrawals? An ICU patient, or a lonesome inmate at Holman. The newborn with no parents. The single mother with no car. The homeless lady and her redheaded daughter, holding a cardboard sign, reading: “Anything helps.”

Well, I’ve already told you, I don’t know much about God.

But I know where you can find some of his kids.