I know what God Looks Like

My daughter when she was about 7 told me casually one day:  "I know what God looks like".   "Oh," I said like one who has had a butterfly land on them and does not want to scare it away by to quickly moving, "what does God look like?"  She calmly described for me something that had happened when she was about three, a time when we were camping right down at the ocean's edge.  The water coming up to about two feet below us during the night, and then in the morning it was low tide and it was also foggy.  As we walked along in the fog we could find marvelous things: starfish and barnacles now exposed on big rocks,  little fish caught in tide pools, objects washed up in the night by waves.  There was a mysterious, magical and yes mystical nature to that moment.  And this moment was the one my daughter now described and then pronounced:  "That is what God looks like"  

There are parents somewhere who would have felt the need to explain that that was just "low tide", or to say that there was nothing to see, or to tell them instead about Jesus Christ, or Allah, or to otherwise deny or argue with their child's spiritual experience.  Who is to say that children do not see God more clearly, easily and with less distortion than adults?  For me it was important to simply validate her spiritual experience.  I simply said: "Yes that is what God looks like?"  She has grown up into a young woman who is confident of her relationship with The Holy Mystery and able to tune in to the Inner Voice.

I remember a client of mine who sees auras, telling me that when she was young she tried to describe this to her parents, and they made her feel so crazy for this that first she stopped telling them, and then she stopped noticing herself, till as an adult she had to work hard to reconnect to her ability to perceive spiritual energies.

How were your spiritual experiences or instincts responded to by adults around you?
How do you nurture the spirituality of children around you?
Do you believe that people of all ages can experience the Divine?
What if the Divine does not look the way we think that God should look?