Which Jesus did you grow up with?
Even if your family wasn't religiously Christian, images and ideas of Jesus were everywhere. Your childhood Jesus might have been limited to a little White chubby peaceful baby, but whatever Jesus you knew as a child shaped the way you know Jesus now.
My Aunt Kickie had pictures of Jesus on the walls of her dark house in the wooded fields of Texas. Jesus knocking on the handleless door. Golden-haired Jesus surrounded by light and sky. Jesus gazing to his left, serious but peaceful. Jesus on the cross, head gently bowed. When she would tell me to wash my bare feet, she didn't have to remind me that Jesus' feet were never dirty, floating slightly above the ground as he surely had.
Jesus was the person I was supposed to aspire to be while knowing I was absolutely nothing like Him who was now seated on a throne waaaaay over there, gazing beatifically down on the living hell of earthly existence.
And God? God was Jesus' Father, who loved Jesus but slaughtered Him to satisfy his anger at me. Jesus was loving and perfect. God was "loving" and incredibly powerful, but sort of a powder keg waiting to blow up the world. Or to send me to the Real hell, which was like getting yelled at and spanked for eternity but so much worse. God was nothing like Jesus, and if you did something wrong you better ask for Jesus' help a.s.a.p. so God wouldn't punish you (which he seemed to enjoy as much as my first grade principal did).
As an adult I understand better the complexities of Jesus: mortal and eternal, tempted but not sinful, making choices every day both then and now. Rather than inserting Jesus into the Old Testament, and then seeing him as something sort of mythical, I read God through Jesus' very human experience and example.
Jesus "is the image of the invisible God...in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell." You want to know how God would treat a dishonored woman facing humiliation? Look at how Jesus treated her (John 8:7). How does God feel about the poor and the powerful? Watch Jesus care for the widows and children and curse their exploiters. We can know God, at least in part, because we can know Jesus.
In Jesus’ actions, we see God’s character, compassion, and heart for humanity. In Jesus’ words, we hear God's voice, so much more gentle than we imagine.
Jesus was also fully human, like you and I. So he was as capable as we are of making mistakes, choosing wrongly, and even abandoning his goals. Of course Jesus had dirty feet! Of course Jesus got hungry! Of course Jesus felt alone and sad and hopeless sometimes: Jesus' last words included "Why have You forgotten me?"
I haven't trusted God every moment of my life. Have you? But because Jesus did, we can know we are safe to do so. The fact that we can see both ourselves and God in Jesus can give us hope for our own behaviors. Hell be damned: we are mysteriously reconciled to God through Jesus' choices, many of which we can choose too.
Jesus shows us how much God wants to be with us and has been with us. In Eden. In Jesus. In the Holy Spirit. God in and with you. God in and with me.
There aren't any pictures of Jesus on my walls, but if I look really hard I can see him in the mirror. Even if my feet need a good scrub.