Who is a child of God?  As a working term, "children of God" gets bandied around quite a bit.  Politicians use it, preachers use it, social media uses it, a cult born in the fervor of the American Sixties called itself by that name (now it calls itself Family International).  Countless people either want to think that they are children of God or want to convince others that they are or one day can be such a person, a child of God.  Many, many people want to think that they are in a special familial relationship with their creator.
     And why not?  Knowing that one enjoys a unique bond with her creator, knowing that when everyone has abandoned oneself, God has not, that is, knowing that across the vast span of space and time oneself is the object of a special divine concern is a highly comforting prospect, an enduring source of solace on the often dark structures of life's playgrounds.  It offers a beacon of hope, a light in the fog of existence's challenges.
     Many will say, however, is that being a child of God is a state into which one does not enter voluntarily, but one into which one must be invited, that is, a condition that one does not possess merely by dint of being a human being.  Viewed through the analogy of a family, this makes sense:  no one can decide to whom she will be born.  Taken another way, however, it gives us pause:  setting aside that many people, unfortunately, never know their earthly father and mother, the rest of us cannot really say we are someone's child until we are aware of who our parents are, until we grasp the fact of our relationship with them.
     So it is, I suggest, with God.  If we wish to think we are children of God, we ought to know precisely whom this God is.  And to know precisely whom this God is, we must actively seek to know him.  We must ask him to talk to us, ask him to reveal himself to us.  We must ask him to unfold, on his terms, who he is (and can be) to us.  We cannot make God as he wish him to be and imagine that we are his child; rather, we must allow God to show himself to us as he actually is, then seek relationship with him.
     The good news here is that God dearly wants us to know him.  After all, that's why he gave us Jesus:  divinity's picture before us.  We need only to open the door.