The God of my adolescence never cared about cuteness—only perfection. He was the fiery God of rolled-up sleeves concerned with the minutiae of sin with all-seeing eyes. The God you looked to, if only to make certain he still saw you, and whose punishments you accepted because negative attention is better than none. A God who could turn both the tables and the rules on you at a moment’s notice. So that all you thought you had done to be right could be wrong. And all that was wrong was presumed right—no matter how wrong it still felt.
