Is It a Story or Reality? Is It a Character or a Person?
It’s that time of year again. Time for Bible Camps, Summer Youth Series, and Vacation Bible Schools. We look forward to this time when we can have extra events for our young people – from little ones all the way up to teens. It’s that time when we try really hard to peak the interest of all of those young people who attend various programs we have for them at our various congregations.
It seems like it grows and grows every year to be bigger and better than the year before. I love seeing the enthusiasm while these events are going on – especially VBS. I certainly am not trying to put a damper on all of that hard work, but there are a couple of things I want all of us to think about.
We live in a world of entertainment. If we want to keep the attention of many of our little people, we have to entertain them somehow. When we are teaching them we have to have pictures or videos or be able to act out the account we are teaching. So many of our teachers are great at doing this, but we often say we are telling the story about a Bible character.
Now I know that good parents read to their children, and there are lots of storybooks and storybook characters with whom they become familiar. They may even have a stuffed animal that represents a character they have heard about in a story. We know those are just characters and not true stories. Do your children know that? When they are little can they differentiate between characters in a book and real people?
I’m certainly no expert in child psychology, but it seems to me that if we tell them we are going to read a Bible story and the character named Jonah or Moses, they might connect that to the story you read them last night about Winnie the Pooh with Piglet being one of the characters.
And so I am reminding all of us who teach younger people (especially the very young) to remember that our Bible is full of many real accounts about real people. These are people we need to know who lived a long time ago and were born, grew up, and lived in the world just like we do. They had good times and bad times in their lives, just like we do. They did bad things and felt guilty like we sometimes do. They also did good things sometimes and felt good about what they had done.
The Bible is full of real people who lived out real happenings in their lives. God gave us these examples to help us live in reality as His children. Let’s make sure our children understand this.
“Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (Psalm 119:105)
AUTHOR: Donna Faughn