Not Your Normal Bedtime Story

Not Your Normal Bedtime Story

At bedtime I have been reading Abigail the “Big Picture Story Bible”. I love it because it ties the old and new testament together into one cohesive story, and while it is simple it is also very well done. Anyway we came to the part where the soldiers (or mean men) come to the garden of Gethsemane and take Jesus away. Then it said that they began to hit Jesus. I looked at her and said, “That was not very nice of them to hit Jesus was it?”

She looked at me as said, “No… girl at school pushed me.”

“Really”, I exclaimed, “That was not nice was it.” I thought it was great that she had an experience (albeit not a very nice one) that allowed her to relate to the story.

Then we got to the part where he died. I thought to myself, wow how do I explain death to a two year old with such limited experience? The only experience with death that she had was with a fish we watched last summer for some friends. I also couldn’t remember if she even knew what happened to the fish, because we tried not to make to big of a deal of it’s death. We did not want to upset her. So, I asked do you remember how the fish that we had died this summer?

She said, “Yes… and mommy flushed him down the toilet.” It was all that I could do not to laugh. Then I had to explain that when people die that we don’t flush them down the toilet, but we put them in a tomb.

So, that was the end of the chapter. Jesus was beat up, made fun of, put on a cross, died, and put in a tomb. It amazed me how even a two year old grasped the injustice and was trying to relate to the pain in the story. Normally, I only read one chapter, but I did not want to leave her there. I could see in her wide eyes that she was really worried about Jesus and seemed pretty sad. So, I read the next chapter which dealt with the next day in the story where all of the disciples were sad because Jesus had died. She started to seem more sad as she related with them. On to the third chapter for the evening.

In the third chapter it talked about the empty tomb and how the disciples were all in a house together and scared because they did not know what was happening. Suddenly she saw Jesus on the page smiling and she said, “Jesus is happy.”
“Yeah, Jesus is happy.” I said.

“Jesus didn’t die. Jesus is happy.” She said. (Intriguing to me how death was permanent to her. If Jesus was still alive then he did not die because death is irreversible. I am not sure that she thought this all the way through, but she grasped that if you are dead, that’s it.)

I told her, “No, Jesus died. Them he was put in a tomb. Then he came back to life. Then he was happy.”

I could see by her facial expressions she was trying to grasp all that I was saying. She had a huge smile. I think that she was really relieved that Jesus did not stay dead. I was too. I also don’t know how much she understood, but I told her that because of Jesus, when we die we don’t have to stay dead either. We, too, can be happy like him. To which her response was much a smiley adamant, “Yeah!”