I had a memorable conversation with a fellow pastor awhile back.  He pulled me aside at a gathering and said, "Dave, I love how you're always so positive when you talk about God.  But…I mean…when do you get to, you know, the bad news?" 

I wasn't sure I was tracking with him.

"You know," he continued, "the bad news!  The fine print!  The stuff, you know, that you have to give up, for instance."

"Stuff like…I don't know…addictions?  Trolling for porn on the internet?"

"Yeah.  Sure.  Stuff like that.

 I thought for a moment and said, "Well…I guess I haven't met many people who've said to themselves, 'You know what I want to be when I grow up?  A porn addict!  Because they have such great lives!"

It seems to me that it's easy to fall into a picture of God that's something like this:  Let's say we see a beautiful Alpine valley on the best of days.  And there's God in the middle of this spectacular valley inviting us to join him.  And we do!  And it's just unbelievable.  Why didn't we do this before?  And he continues beckoning us further on into this awesome scene, but this time around a corner.  And we follow him…and he hits us over the head and steals our wallet.

Is God good news or, in the end, the opposite?  In this era of religiously-inspired war and terrorism, that strikes me as a great and important question.  Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins-maybe our leading atheist of the moment-takes up that gauntlet in his new book The God Delusion.  Not only, says he, is belief in God irrational at the deepest levels, it's dangerous.  Just look at terrorism in Jerusalem today or during the Crusades.  Religion makes us stupid and evil.

So there!  Who, picking up a paper, can't relate to that?  If we must have a little God in our lives for whatever reason, maybe it would make sense to keep it at that level: a little God.  Too much God evidently will either deny us the fun we'd been hoping to have or will-as God cooks us like the frog in the kettle, unaware that we're about to boil to death-sap us of our good humor and lead us to hate pretty much everyone.

And yet the great saints didn't seem like that, the Francises and the Mother Teresas and even folks like our own ever-more mellow and gracious and reflective Billy Graham.  (Perhaps you saw the inspiring recent Newsweek cover story on Graham.  I don't know about you, but that's who I want to be when I grow up.) 

It can lead one to wonder if there's a difference between diving deep into religion and diving deep into God, as if one will ruin you and one will astound you.
I have another pastor friend who has a young son who has some neurological disabilities that keep him from fully connecting with other kids or from fully understanding some complex parts of his school curriculum or even grasping the rules to schoolyard games. 

One night not long ago the boy was sobbing at bedtime because he hadn't been able to understand the rules of a game he thought he could play well, and he'd left humiliated.  My friend couldn't think of anything to say beyond "hang in there," which obviously was a dead end. 

But my friend suddenly flashed a prayer and found himself saying to his son: "You know, there's something out there that God has for you that you do better than other people.  Like, you know what I think I do better than many people?  Lead a church.  And you know when I found that out?  When I was about 37.  For all those years before, I was waiting.  And God has something out there for you that you do better than other people."

And his son turned to him, tears streaming down his face, and demanded, "Is that true?" And my friend, faltering, found himself asking God, "Good question. IS that true?"  And he tells me that, like a flash, he felt as if God said to him, "You can take it to the bank." Which he said to his son.  And his son rolled over and grabbed my friend's neck in a death grip and sobbed and sobbed and went to sleep.

Last week my friend watched his son play lacrosse and play it pretty well and make some plays that caused his teammates to come over and clap him on the back wholeheartedly.

Too much religion may have all sorts of downsides that will shrivel your life and make you a worse person than you were beforehand.  But too much God...?  That's something I have yet to experience.