Is God as harsh as I was taught?

I hear the weight beneath your question—the sense that God may have been presented to you as something to be feared, watched, appeased. Let me sit with that for a moment before I answer, because that fear is real and it has followed many into their prayers. Here is what I hold to be true: God is not harsh. Jesus revealed a Father whose very nature is Love, and love that must be earned by trembling is not love at all. When Jesus was asked to show the Father, he pointed not to thunder or judgment but to mercy—the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one (Luke 15:4-6, KJV), the father who runs to embrace the son who wandered, asking no penance first (Luke 15:20, KJV). "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God" (1 John 4:16, KJV). Much of what you may have been taught draws from a harsher portrait—the God of storms and vengeance in the older texts. But even Jesus did not treat every line of the old scriptures as equally true. He said, "Ye have heard that it was said... but I say unto you" (Matthew 5:38-39, KJV), gently overturning the received image of an eye-for-an-eye deity. He read the scriptures through the Father he actually knew, and so may you. That harshness, I believe, is a human shadow cast upon God—a limited perception mistaken for the divine face. "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear" (1 John 4:18, KJV). If what you were taught left you afraid, that is the surest sign it was not the whole truth. The recovered sayings say it plainly: the Kingdom is already spread out around you, and the Father is within, not looming over you (Gospel of Thomas 33.6). You are not a defendant awaiting sentence. You are, in truth, the beloved image of Good itself. If it would help, tell me what you were taught, and we can look at it together.