The teacher wanted to test their creativity. Instead of 'paint a picture of a house', this week it was 'paint a picture of absolutely anything at all'. Wow!
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Thomas painted a picture of his mum. Jasmine did one of her family's back garden, with lots of pretty flowers and green and white and things.
Rachel was more of a mathematician than an artist and the connections between her squares and triangles and cubism were tenuous. She had never heard of Euclid or Picasso or Gauguin, but intuitively she preferred geometry to post-impressionism.
Jack had many talents, but imagination was not one of them - he painted Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard.
Gemma did the best picture. Swirling iridescent colours. Incredible shapes. The colour drew you toward itself like a magnet. Captivating. Wondrous. Astonishing. Gemma didn't think it all out first. She just painted. The painting painted through her. It was beautiful. Only thing was, no one knew what it was.
"Gemma, that is a wonderful picture. Tell us all what it is," her teacher said.
"Can't you tell?" replied Gemma, miffed and on the verge of a huff tending towards a monumental sulk.
"Gemma, your picture is so wonderful that it could be absolutely anything," the teacher continued, combining affirmation and political correctness in as few words as possible.
"So what is it?"
"It's God," said Gemma.
The response was much less than Gemma had hoped for.
"But Gemma, it can't be God."
Gemma asked why not. "Because no one knows what God looks like" - a definitive grown-up answer.
To which Gemma replied with contemptuous astonishment, "Well, now you do."
Grown-ups have thought and reasoned and argued for a very long time about God and what God is like.
Sometimes they hurt each other or worse because they can't abide two different understandings of God.
They work it all out nice and logically. They put God in their grown-ups' box and Gemma's paintbrushes in another box.
Once upon a time Gemma saw more in a split second than they sometimes see in a lifetime. I hope Gemma never grows up. Not too much anyway.
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