Tag: bible stories (page 1 of 4)

August 7, 2020 / 0 Comments

The Promises of God Storybook Bible

From our house sometimes we can smell the ocean. We can’t see it—it’s a few blocks, a bluff, some train tracks, and a smattering of industrial buildings away—but when the wind hits the water just right, that salty, seaweedy smell whisks up the bluff to us. Whoever smells it first turns into the wind, smiling. The rest of us know what that means.

Those moments lift the roof off our little world and remind us that right over there, behind those houses, is an ocean. While the girls ride shrieking down the street on their bikes, and I wrestle with a stubborn weed and wish I had a sunhat and maybe a hacksaw, the ocean ebbs and flows out there, just beyond the bluff. I may not like swimming in it, but I have gone out of my way several times during quarantine to go park somewhere and just watch the water. I like to be reminded that it’s there.

So it is with a good story bible: sometimes a good one zooms out to just the right distance, allowing us to enjoy a single Bible story while still whisking in that breath of salty, sea air and reminding us that God always works at something bigger even in the smallest stories.

The Promises of God Storybook Bible is just such a story bible. Jennifer Lyell has taught preschool kids for decades and knows how to tell a Bible story winsomely. But she also links each one to the promises God made his people and traces, throughout the book, the big story of God’s plan for our redemption. She arranges God’s promises like plot points and shows how God answers those promises throughout Scripture (curious, though, that his covenant with David didn’t make the cut. I wonder why?).

We gave this book to Josie, our youngest, but when we read it aloud to all four girls we found that the tone was perfect for our six- and four year olds, but the discussion questions seemed to fit everybody. I was so grateful for this book during those first months of quarantine, when we needed more than ever to be reminded that God is still keeping his promises, whatever it looks like from our vantage point, in this moment. He is still present, even when we can’t see him, and sometimes he sends us small reminders and we lean into the wind, smiling.

The Promises of God Storybook Bible
Jennifer Lyell; Thanos Tsilis (2019)

Seek and Find: Old Testament Bible Stories | Little Book, Big Story

July 10, 2020 / 0 Comments

Seek & Find: Old Testament Stories

We’ve read many, many picture books in our twelve years as parents. But the books our readers and pre-readers alike tend to pore over and explore most on their own are the ones with detailed illustrations filled with lots of things to find—I Spy; Where’s Waldo; the Usborne Things to Spot books. These books combine play with very short stories (sometimes shown only through the illustrations) and allow kids to see books as something to be explored as well as read.

Sarah Parker’s Seek and Find: Old Testament Bible Stories combines this style of book with eight Old Testament stories, written for the youngest readers. Each double spread drops readers into a single scene in the story and gives them a key full of things to find in André Parker’s delightful illustrations: ten white dandelions, five heavy hammers, two wooden wheelbarrows, and so on. The front of the book introduces additional things to find in each story, including a little wren who appears in every single one.

If you’re looking for in depth re-tellings of each Old Testament story, this probably isn’t the book for you. But if you are looking for an interactive way to introduce a child to some of the Old Testament’s Greatest Hits—especially if you’re looking for a great way to discuss some of those stories with a young child—look no further! Seek and Find gives little ones plenty to explore and search for while they listen to some of the greatest adventures in the Old Testament.

Seek and Find: Old Testament Bible Stories
Sarah Parker; Andre Parker (2020)

Disclosure: I did receive a copy of this book for review, but I was not obligated to review this book or compensated for my review in any way. I share this book with you because I love it, not because I was paid to do so.

June 28, 2019 / 0 Comments

Bible Infographics for Kids

Important Notice:

Last year, we held a family meeting to settle our last-day-of-school tradition. Because I get to (sort of arbitrarily) pick which day is our last, this seemed important. And because, at the time of the meeting, we were at the beach with a trip to Menchie’s dangling in front of us like a sprinkle-coated carrot, the vote was unanimous: our last-day-of-school tradition shall henceforth be a day at the beach and a trip to Menchie’s.

That day came two weeks ago. We spent the morning picnicking on a rocky Pacific Northwest beach, rummaging through tidepools and climbing massive sandstone boulders, shaped through centuries of the water’s patient work (insert homeschooling metaphor here). We watched a trio of bald eagles swoop overhead, scraped our knees on barnacles, and petted sea stars.

The Last Day of School! | Little Book, Big Story

Then, we concocted the most horrific frozen yogurt sundaes at Menchie’s: mine had more to do with peanut butter and chocolate, but there were some variations on a cotton candy + marshmallow sauce + sprinkles happening among the other members of our table. It was all very pink.

But I digress. What I meant to say was: we’re done with school. Summer is under way! And with it comes my annual summer break. Until mid-September or so, I’m going to share one of my favorite old posts with you every other week, so this will be the last new book review until the fall. But I hope to meet you on the other side with a whole bunch of beautiful new books. (I have a pile of them waiting for you already.)

In the meantime, may your summer be sticky, sandy, and sunny!

But this book can’t wait until September.

For those of you who annotate and doodle your way through every sermon or lecture, who find that listening to audio books is like not reading the book at all, who decode thorny problems by drawing them out in spidery graphs with squiggly lines—you visual people (you’re my people!). I’m talking to you.

Bible Infographics for Kids (subtitle: “Giants, Ninja Skills, a Talking Donkey, and What’s the Deal with the Tabernacle?”) is a collection of—wait for it—Bible infographics for kids. These are big, bold, graphic illustrations that, in the words of this book’s authors, “help [us] see information that might otherwise be hard to understand.” For the visual learners among us, getting to “see” information means we’ll also remember it. For all of us, it’s fun.

In Bible Infographics for Kids, the authors and illustrator use maps and probability charts and comparisons to bring home some of the weirder truths of Scripture (did you know that the odds of one person fulfilling just eight Old Testament prophecies is the same as someone finding one specific coin in a pile of silver dollars so big it covered the state of Texas two feet deep? Me neither. And yet Jesus fulfilled forty-eight Old Testament prophecies!).

But my favorite part, the book’s crowning beauty, is a Bible board game that is really a visual map of the Bible’s narrative. It’s color-coded. It’s clever. And it’s glorious.

I have found all of my kids (and some of their friends) curled up with this book at some point. I have even curled up with it myself. And despite the fact that I have been reading the Bible for nearly twenty years now, I still learn something new every time I pick up Bible Infographics for Kids: how the disciples all relate to one another! Which disciple took the gospel to which part of the world!

These may not be facts necessary to our understanding of Scripture, but they sure highlight the patterns and context of Scripture in a way that helps me (and, Lord-willing, my kids) better know and love its Author.

Bible Infographics for Kids
Harvest House; Brian Hurst (2018)

March 22, 2019 / 0 Comments

Goodbye to Goodbyes

How do you talk to a child about death?

When my daughters want to know why they no longer see a dear friend at church anymore, or how come their great-granddad had to die before they met him, I am profoundly grateful for the Resurrection. You will meet him one day, I say. You will see her again.

This is not fluffy-winged, angel-studded wishful thinking, but a promise: Jesus has gone first, through death and into new life (1 Corinthians 15:20). He died and rose from the dead, and he has made a way for us to follow him. Clothed in resurrected bodies, we will sit at the table with him and feast; we will fill a city with song; we will see our heavenly Father face to face.

We do not know what will happen between now and that moment, and sometimes the not knowing is bitter. But, I tell them, God knows how our stories go, and he will help us bear our burdens. He will shepherd us through those gates.

I am glad for that hope when they sigh heavily or fearfully connect the dot “she died” with “I could die, too.” In those moments, we can look back to Jesus, who died—and yet what beauty came through his death! And we can look back further still to Lazarus, whose story is both a beacon of what Jesus can do, as well as a foretelling of what he would do in himself.

Goodbye to Goodbyes, the newest installment of my absolutely favorite series Tales That Tell the Truth, shares the story of Lazarus and his sisters. Lauren Chandler’s telling is both gentle and honest—Jesus doesn’t swoop on the scene like a superhero and command Lazarus to live amid a cloud of applause and confetti. He takes his time coming to Lazarus, and Chandler lets that sink in: Mary and Martha called for him, and Jesus didn’t come right away. And while he dawdled, Lazarus died.

But when at last Jesus does come, we see why he waited. And in the meantime, we see him grieving with Mary and Martha—Catalina Echeverri’s illustrations (again, among my favorites) capture their grief in a way that feels true to life and yet isn’t overwhelming for young readers. They weep and it’s messy, and the way Jesus holds them—I feel comforted just looking at it.

(In fact, those pictures of Jesus holding tight to them in their grief might be my favorite scenes in the whole book. We cannot see him now, but that reminder that he has arms for holding the hurting and that we will one day see and feel them wrapped around us—that is beautiful. I feel a little sniffly thinking about it.)

I said in my post about The Friend Who Forgives that that one was my favorite of the Tales That Tell the Truth because it was the one I’d read most recently. Which means that this one must now be my favorite. And it is.

But I think it might really and truly be my favorite because of the story and the grace with which it’s handled. Giving children a book that addresses both the sorrow of grief and the hope of resurrection—that is beautiful and hard to do, and I am so grateful Lauren Chandler has done it.

Goodbye to Goodbyes: A True Story About Lazarus and an Empty Tomb
Lauren Chandler; Catalina Echeverri (2019)

Disclosure: I did receive copies of this for review, but I was not obligated to review this book or compensated for my review in any way. I share this book with you because I love it, not because I was paid to do so.

March 7, 2019 / 0 Comments

The Tell-Me Stories

From the author of our beloved Read-Aloud Bible Stories comes this thrift store find: The Tell-Me Stories, a collection of Jesus’ parables told with warmth and welcome for the littlest, most fidgety crowd.

I love the way Ella Lindvall finds her way into a Bible story and goes straight for the heart of it. She peels back the layers (layers I hope my kids return to and delight in discovering as they grow older) and gets to the core of the story. That is what she shares with her audience of toddlers and parents who might think they’ve heard it all.

The Tell-Me Stories shares Jesus’ parables in a simple, straightforward way. Each one ends with a lesson, a tactic I don’t always love but that Lindvall does well. Through these stories we see Jesus the way he might have appeared to a child: welcoming, willing to part the grown-ups and make a path for the children to come to him.

The Tell-Me Stories: Volume 1
Ella K. Lindvall; Kent Puckett (2000)

Tag: bible stories (page 1 of 4)

The Promises of God Storybook Bible

Seek & Find: Old Testament Stories

Bible Infographics for Kids

Goodbye to Goodbyes

The Tell-Me Stories

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