Did God have a mum or a dad?

In over 20 years of professional children’s ministry and amateur dadding this question, and variations of it, have been asked more times than any other. It lies in the same category as the ‘Who made God?’ question. Was there something or someone before God? Has He always been there and will He always be there? There is a wondering in the child at a God who may be bigger than time and space; a God who is utterly different from us – how is He like us; how is He different? We know there’s a beginning to the world, but what about God?

It’s a vitally important question, not just for them but for us as well. Yet, it is sometimes easy to dismiss because of the way it is asked by the child. It comes across as cutesy, or even banal; like imagining a world which exists on the back of an endless series of turtles as Terry Pratchett describes. After all, if God has a Mum and Dad then surely God’s Mum and Dad have parents, and so on. Yet, as with so many questions from children, it harbours an important sense that the child is seeking to fit together what they understand of reality with what they do not understand. The first thing I seek to do when I get a question like this is to acknowledge it as a reasonable question, a good question, rather than to dismiss it as silly or unimportant.