“Dad?” Gideon called from the backseat. “Where did God come from?”

I checked in the rearview mirror and found him staring quizically back at me.

“Oh,” I said as I glancing at the door of the grocery store hoping to find Andrea on her way back to the parking lot so she could maybe answer this one. But she was not there. I sighed and put my phone down and turned in my seat to face him. “Okay… well… That’s a really smart question Gideon. I’m really glad you are thinking about really smart things like that.”

“Um, okay,” he said, still waiting for me to give a real answer. “But where did he come from?”

“Yeah. Alright.” I took a deep breath, “So, God is not like us. We come from somewhere, so it’s easy for us to just assume that everything else must come from somewhere too. But God isn’t like that. He doesn’t have to come from somewhere. He just is. Sometimes you can’t define one thing by looking at something different. A piece of string can’t ask how long a cloud is. Or something like that. Would an ear ever understand how loud a smell is? It doesn’t make sense. God was just always here.”

He pondered this for a few seconds and I gave him some time to think.

“Yeah, okay. I just mean, how did God get into our car?”

I slowly looked at the store entrance again and then back at my son. “Alright, I have no idea what you are talking about.”

He seemed kind of frustrated. “When I got into the car. I sat on God and I don’t know how he got here!” He mimed sitting down in the car and pulling something out from under his pants.

I realized while he was doing all of this that he was waving something around in his hand. He pointed it at me.

“Gideon, what is that?”

He leaned forward and I took it from him. It was a small white bust of a man with serious eyes and a long beard. There was a name embossed on the base.

“Gideon, this is not God. This is Brahms.”

This information obviously meant nothing to him.

“He was a composer.” I vainly continued. “He wrote music.”

My son nodded, “Okay, but why does he look like God?”

I shook my head “He doesn’t look like God,” I said. “What makes you think that this old man with no arms looks like God?”

“He has a beard.”

I handed the figure back to my son. “Well, God does not have a beard. That’s not…” I sighed. “Why do we have a bust of Brahms in our car? Where did that even come from?”

He shook the little composer in the air in irritation. “I don’t know where he came from! That is what I have been asking You!”

“Oh… Right…” I suddenly understood everything that had just been happening. “I see. Well. I don’t know the answer to that. Sorry.” I smiled apologetically. “I guess you could say, Brahms works in mysterious ways.” I turned around and looked anxiously back at the entrance to the grocery store. “Especially in this family.”