We carry our relationships with us. Meaning, as we experience important relationships in our life, we create representations of these relationships in our minds. This helps us to anticipate how to get our needs met and how to meet the needs of the other. Simply put, we hold them in our minds and they hold us in theirs. This is core to being human. The irony is we are seldom aware of how these representations influence us.

Our relationship with God is no different. As we experience a meaningful relationship with God, we also create representations of Him in our minds. In other words, it is how we think God is thinking of us.

Our representations of God can help or hinder our spiritual walk. Optimally, we would come to know God for Who He really is (i.e., Love, Benevolence, Omnipotence, Sovereignty, Divine Foreknowledge), which would create a relational representation of God that would be different from the representations others in our lives. If not, God may not get a fair share. For instance, if we feel shame because we have a representation of God in our minds that we must hide from God the unloveable parts of ourselves as we did with our parents, then God may not get a chance to be fully God.

I think a major task in our spiritual walk is to begin the process of understanding our relational representations and their influence. Armed with this information, we could then begin the process of letting God impact us in new ways.