Independence Day

It was past  bedtime when I corralled our oldest kid into bed. We're reading a favorite children's series to him right now, but there was no way I was going to read an entire chapter (the last chapter) this late. So I decided it would be a story from his Jesus Storybook Bible.

We're at roughly the Annunciation and though we've read every story in this particular children's Bible before, when reading them aloud to my kids, the profundity of the stories that many of us learned as children (Adam, Esther, Moses, David, Daniel, Jesus)--we're even tempted to call them "children's Bible stories"--is staggering.

The Good News. That's what "gospel means."

I try to impress this deeper meaning on my children, but sometimes it doesn't feel like good news, especially in light of its necessity to start with the bad news that you're tangled up in the Fall; you're culpable; you're a sinner.

But the bad part MUST be part of the good news. It just must. Because with the news that there is actually something wrong with me comes the flip side of the coin that that crookedness has a healer and He is present. So it's bad--and man do I fight it--but really it turns out to be all good. If I don't accept the uncomfortable truth about myself, I never get the soul-washing gladness that comes on the other side.

All the crookedness you're clinging to precisely because it's quite literally your nature will bring you a whole life of pointless grasping but He can fix it.

I trust that God will drive home, over time, the power of the gospel hidden in the seemingly simplistic stories we read to our kids.