Tag: elementary (page 1 of 19)

August 2, 2024 / 0 Comments

The God Contest

This week’s summer re-run originally appeared on this blog in March of 2021.

This week, our middle two daughters competed in their first spelling bee, and in the weeks leading up to it, our dinner hour turned into Spelling Bee Practice, with my husband and I taking turns tossing the girls words to spell while we ate our meal (and occasionally tried to stump each other).

Why it’s so funny to misspell words, I can’t say, but it is. By the end of each of these dinners, at least one of us laughed so hard we cried and the rest of us had succumbed to various stages of helpless giggles. When I asked our first grader to spell “sting,” she stood up beside her chair and said, cheerfully, “Sting! B-E-E, sting!”

Or when Mitch playfully asked Josie (almost five) to spell her name? “J-O-something-something-E!”

But, hilarity aside, this was their first time competing, and excited as they were I know they were nervous, too. What if they lost? What if they won, and had to go on to face the next round of the competition? Standing up in front of your own class is daunting enough. What if they got up there and then forgot the “a” in “each”?

Carl Laferton’s new book, The God Contest, explores a different contest: that between Elijah and the priests of Baal (or, really, between God and Baal). This contest asked the question, “Who is the true God?” In the delightful tradition of the rest of the Tales That Tell the Truth series, The God Contest shares a favorite biblical story, but rather than treat that story as a complete entity, separate from the rest of Scripture, this book shows how the story of Elijah and the prophets points toward Jesus. The Israelites weren’t the only ones to wonder who was the true God, after all, and God settled the question once and for all not in a blaze of fire, but in a blaze of life at Jesus’s resurrection.

Alas, my daughters did not win their spelling bees, though it sounds like they each lasted a while and they sure worked hard. But God’s contest is settled: he is the victor. Yet rather than keep the prize for himself, he has given it—lavishly, abundantly—to those who trust in him. May this book point those young readers to the One who loves them so.

The God Contest: The True Story of Elijah, Jesus, and the Greatest Victory
Carl Laferton; Catalina Echeverri (2021)

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.

July 5, 2024 / 0 Comments

Indescribable

This week’s summer re-run originally published in June 2020, back when my kids were so small.

Not long ago, a single spider could clear any room of our house. (I take no pride in saying that I was often the first one to leave.) One report of a spider in the play room and no one would go up there again until Mitch had presented evidence of a body. One web on the front porch, and no one would use the front door until every corner of the porch had been swept.

But now we have pet spiders—three of them. Goldie the garden spider hangs her web outside our dining room window; a wee baby spider just set up shop over a planter on the patio. And Rosie, the incredible redback jumping spider, tucked her burrito-shaped web into a crack in our raised garden bed. We visit her every day and often, to Rosie’s chagrin, the little girls hover right over her, chatting and pointing.

What changed?

We learned more about spiders. They became not a whole scary lot of bugs that run, as C.S. Lewis once unforgettably observed, like disembodied hands, but individuals: a male house spider may be horrifyingly large, but now we know he’s just hanging out in the corners of our dining room, looking for a lady friend. A garden spider isn’t spinning a web across our porch steps out of spite, but because she’s hoping to snack on a few of the bugs that try to snack on our hellebore.

Just as this shift isn’t limited to spiders (we now have snail friends and roly poly friends, and it’s all I can do to deter the younger girls from keeping ladybugs in their pockets), it isn’t limited to one book either. But if I had to choose one book that has taught us to love the world around us a bit better and to see it in a little more detail, I’d choose Indescribable.

Indescribable sits in the windowsill near our table and hardly anyone grumbles when we pull it down to read at dinner. This book is a curious mix of Scripture, scientific exploration, devotional readings, and fun “Bet you didn’t know this!” facts about our world.

Each reading looks at some incredible aspect of the world and considers, without reaching far for the connection, what that aspect says about God. The death of stars; our respiratory system; shark’s teeth—each of these topics spark wonder in us, and each of these can teach us something about God. When so many people assume that God and science stand in opposition to one another, Louis Giglio shows us that science does not inevitably lead to skepticism but can instead teach us to recognize, through even unlikely things like spiders and snails, the personality and joy of God.

Giglio has introduced us to incredible facts about whales and volcanoes and trees and snow. But he doesn’t just point at those things and say, “Isn’t this cool? Isn’t it great how this happens?”—and then walk away. Instead, he points from the tree to the Tree Maker and says, “Look what this says about him. Look how purposeful and wonderful this tree is. Enjoy it. And through it, know the one who made it.”

“The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), and so do redback jumping spiders named Rosie. Rejoice.

Indescribable: 100 Devotions About God & Science
Louis Giglio; Nicola Anderson (2017)

June 7, 2024 / 0 Comments

I Think I Think A Lot

Bedtime at our house involves a fair amount of bustling, some snuggling, some tooth-brushing, and a lot of talking—so much talking. I like to joke that I’m a part-time counselor these days, now that all four girls are fluent conversationalists facing challenges that grow right along with them. Often the things they worry about step politely to the side during the day, when there is so much else going on. But at bedtime these worries stride down to the footlights and demand to be heard, and so one daughter or another will drift downstairs and sidle up to one of us, hoping we’ll ask them what’s wrong.

Often, the problem is as big and as broad as this: “I don’t know how to turn my brain off!” To which I can relate.

And so I, with my houseful of overthinkers, am grateful for Jessica Whipple’s sweet book, I Think I Think A Lot, in which the main character wrestles with the fact that she just seems to think and worry so much more than her peers do. The result is a series of insights about her friends that contrast the way she thinks about the world with the way they think about it. The story serves as a fun introduction to the different ways we all think about the world around us and invites readers to recognize themselves in one or other of the characters. And to know that, wherever they land, these differences are good and interesting.

Whipple writes from her own experience with OCD, which provides a helpful backdrop for the book. And she writes broadly enough that I Think I Think a Lot can help kids from all sorts of backgrounds begin to find words for the way they see the world—and to understand better how their friends and siblings might see it differently.

At our house, I think we all think a lot. And you know what? We can glorify God in that, too.

I Think I Think a Lot
Jessica Whipple; Josée Bisaillon (2023)

Though I did receive a free copy of this book for review, I am not being paid to promote it. My enthusiasm for this book is abundant and purely voluntary.

March 15, 2024 / 0 Comments

Something Better Coming

I have written recently, in a few different places, about the loss of a very good friend and about her legacy. My daughters didn’t get to meet her, but they love her because she loved them—Leslie always asked about them, and even sent the occasional birthday gift their way, so she was a sweet presence to my girls even though she lived on the other side of the country.

The other day, my daughter asked about Leslie’s birthday. “We have to celebrate it,” she said. But when I opened my contacts to double-check the date of Leslie’s birthday, my daughter grew suddenly still. “You mean,” she said quietly, “you used to text her, but now—you can’t anymore?”

And then she slipped her arms around my waist and squeezed hard.

My friend has been gone for almost a year, but somehow that was the thing that made her death real—and suddenly, acutely wrong—for my daughter. That realization that, though my friend lives still, in a newer, better way, no message I can send her now will reach her.

“Oh death, where is your sting?” Scripture proclaims (1 Cor. 15:55). And yet, we feel the sting of death around us all the time—as it claims those we love, or in any number of endings that are woven into our daily lives. Things aren’t what they should be, and even our children know it on a bone-deep level.

And so I’m grateful for the season of Lent, where we expose that undercurrent of dis-ease for a bit and put it in its proper place, by reminding ourselves and one another that it will not always be this way. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, death will truly—and forever—lose its sting.

Megan Saben’s book Something Better Coming shows beautifully the hope and anticipation we have, in Christ, as we lean toward Easter. By telling the stories of the resurrections Jesus performed, each one building upon the previous one and pointing toward the next one with the refrain “There’s something better coming,” she gives readers a sense of culmination and completion through the story of Jesus’s resurrection.

This is a glorious way to read the Easter story. We see, through the building tension, that his resurrection was not a single event, disconnected from Scripture, but one woven seamlessly into it—a grand disruption, yes, but one that was promised and foreshadowed through a series of smaller resurrections sewn all throughout the Bible and, specifically, the Gospels.

I am deeply grateful for the truth of the resurrection and for its assurance that, though death stings now, there’s something better coming. I’m glad for that truth when I squeeze my daughter back and assure her that it won’t always be this way—there’s something better coming.

Something Better Coming
Megan Saben; Ryan Flanders (2022)

Though I did receive a free copy of this book for review, I am not being paid to promote it. My enthusiasm for this book is abundant and purely voluntary!

March 1, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Mousehole Cat

My favorite kind of mail is Surprise Mail: the packages that I didn’t order, but that arrive on our porch unannounced and full of possibility.

The Mousehole Cat arrived in just such a package: a friend sent it as a surprise, but also, because the card ended up arriving separately a few days later, as a bit of a mystery. I saw her name on the package but I didn’t have context for the gift. Instead, we opened the book and wondered at it—the why? and the what for?—before we sat down to lunch and read it aloud.

And the book was wonderful. The Mousehole Cat is about a cat, Mowzer, who lives with a fisherman in a place called “The Mousehole” because the bay is almost completely closed off from the sea, but when a storm rolls in that prevents the townsfolk from fishing and famine looms over them, the fisherman makes a brave and sacrificial decision to save the town. And Mowzer sails out with him.

The illustrations in this book are detailed and gorgeous, so much so that it felt hard to read aloud (almost!) because my eyes kept straying toward the pictures even as I tried to read the words. Imagine: Nicola Bayley portrays the storm as the Great Storm-Cat, personifying it in a way that makes it fun for young readers to spot the Cat curled among the clouds and wind, batting playfully with the waves and pouncing through the sky. How could one not get a little lost in illustrations like that?

The only solution, I suppose, is to read it again—and again—making this a book worth savoring. Through both the story and the illustrations, The Mousehole Cat gives us a stunningly beautiful example of what it can look like to love not merely “in word or talk but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18).

The Mousehole Cat
Antonia Barber; Nicola Bayley (1990)

Tag: elementary (page 1 of 19)

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