When I was a little girl, my parents explained to me that Jesus was everywhere. So, at night, I used to sleep in a little ball at the corner of my bed so Jesus would have room to roll over.

Sister Amanda

My CCD teacher always talked about "letting Jesus into the room in your heart". My parents never really raised me Catholic, and I never really thought religiously, so I would go home wondering about rooms in my heart, which I never thought about as this wondrous emotional thing, more as a mass of beating organ...and how it was furnished and the fact that there was a door on my heart, and why the hell Jesus was allowed in there??? I didn't tell him he could go in....

Anon

As kids, my cousin and I once put the watering hose in a hole in the ground and thought we could kill the devil by puting hell's fire out.

Wade & Chad

When I was younger, my best friend told me that anything you say after the word "holy" was what you were calling God. So if you said "holy cow", you were calling God a cow. Growing up a Christian, I didn't want God to think I thought badly of him. So I'd refrain from ever saying the word "holy." It wasn't till my teenage years when I had started to use that word again.

Nicci

Up until I was about 9, I thought all the snakes were the devils children because satan was a snake during the story of Adam and Eve. So I would always catch the snakes and talk to them so when they saw "dad" (aka:the devil) that just incase I didn't get to heaven the devil would somehow be nicer to me than everybody else because I was friends with his "kids".

Clueless

I was told that "God made everybody". I would sit in church with my family on Sundays and get a vivid mental image of God standing in my kitchen with a frying pan on the stove... getting ready to "make people". I knew the first ingredient would have to be a pat of butter, so the people wouldn't stick to the pan... but could never quite figure out any of the other ingredients He would use to make us.

vanillabean

When I was young, I was fond of using "I swear to God", as it was commonly used at school. Then my parents told me that this was "using the Lord's name in vain" and that this was very bad. Having been told how powerful God was by my friends at school (I didn't go to church, but they did), I refrained from even THINKING the words "I swear to God", because I was terrified he was going to smite me. This carried on for a couple of years, until I finally realized that the other kids had continued saying it and God didn't fry them.

Lindsay

I thought god was a shrinky-dink butterfly for about a year or two when I was a kid. I immigrated to Israel from Russia when I was six and to learn the language I was sent to a religious day camp. The only word I picked up (probably because it was repeated to often) was god, and then we made shrinky-dinks. The two got tangled up in my mind because my parents had never even mentioned god to me before and it was the hardest concept to grasp when you're six years old and don't speak the language you're being preached to in. The ordeal I went through when I lost said shrinky-dink butterfly was the only crisis of faith I've ever had and I've since been enjoying a decidedly god-free life.

Mary

My grandfather died when I was 7. When we went to the cemetary, I noticed all these graves that said 'INRI' on them. Since I wasn't ever raised religiously, I figured that Inri was just the last name of some really big, important family whose members were all buried in that cemetary. Then my Catholic friend told me differently.

heron

once I heard my dad say "God dammit!" and this lead me to think God and Dammit were actual people. So when I'd go to sleep I'd imagine them just talking ("hey God!" "what, Dammit?") and maybe building a person or two. also, I imagined God as looking like a friend of my parents'.

Tory

i used to think that god or someone was sending me secret messages through the trees. the way it worked was i'd look at various trees' branches and find "letters" hidden in the tangle of branches and leaves that would spell out a message. sometimes the messages were just regular greetings, or comments about things i had done, but sometimes they predicted stuff that would happen in the future. once i got really scared when i thought i saw "beth will die," because she was my babysitter & she was awesome. but beth was ok....

i'm an athiest now.

I used to picture God as George Washington.

Sioux

I used to think that when I went to church and everyone said "Thanks be to god." that everyone was saying "Thanks, Beeta God." I thought that "Beeta God" was the priest, who was pretending to be God, and was crazy, so everyone was just humoring him.

Ben

When I went to church I used to think that the priest was God. I used to always say, "Mommy look there's God!"

Karen

I used to picture God as wearing a robe and headdress like a Shiek.

Will

I used to trick my sister, Linda, into believing that if I pressed my bellybutton with my finger, while making a "buzzzzzz" sound, that I turned into the Devil. This tactic scared her stiff for about 10 years. I got an uninhibited, crazed look on my face and probably bared my teeth. I never laughed while I was doing it so she never really knew I was kidding. I only did it spur of the moment and when the two of us were alone. I'm a year and a half younger than her and felt amply justified in doing this as sometimes she had the audacity to call me a yellow-bellied-sap-sucker.

Patti

Being Catholic, my family was pretty excited when the Pope visited Canada the year I turned 4. Our parish priest was a pretty old, white-haired guy, and sometime after the Pope's visit I asked my mother, "When will Fr. G become Pope?" I somehow had gotten the idea that all a priest had to do to become Pope was live long enough, and then they all took turns or something.

My mother thought it was pretty funny. I found out from her years later that apparently Fr. G had a bit of a reputation as a tippler.

Kate