I’d hazard a guess that anyone who spends time with a child of three or four is familiar with one simple word: “Why?” It is endless in its variations, relentless in its application, and astonishing in its ability to reduce the full-grown human brain to a bowl of quivering mush, capable only of whimpering feebly, “I don’t know! That’s why!”
On good days, I’m quick with my answers, willing to sit at my daughter’s (pick one) level and explore the world of the pill bug/neighbor’s dog/pumpkin vine. On bad days, I . . . well, I wish I could answer as beautifully and quickly as the parents in this book seem to do.
Does God Know How to Tie Shoes? is a series of questions and answers, passed back and forth between a girl named Katrina and her wise, Bible-minded parents. There’s no narrative, only questions (in the voice of spunky, sweet Katrina) and answers (in the voice of her parents, who draw from the Psalms to answer Katrina’s delightfully offbeat—but believable—inquiries about God).
“Mama, does God ever have to clean up His room?”
“He wakes the dawn and makes sure the seasons change. Yes, He keeps everything in order.”
“But even in His closet?”
The illustrations are beautiful, textured and rich, and they show both the wideness of the creation Katrina contemplates with her parents as well as the intimacy of small moments spent together as a family. For an impulse buy at a secondhand bookstore, Does God Know How to Tie Shoes? delivers. And reading it to an inquisitive child serves as a welcome reprieve from those other questions: the ones not about God, but about paper and laundry and cotton balls . . .
Does God Know How to Tie Shoes?
Nancy White Carlstrom (1996)
Gratuitous Baby Photo!
