Narration: Shepherding Little Readers
After giving birth to our fourth baby, I was utterly depleted—body and soul. Sunlight seemed too harsh, and I could not step out of our apartment for months. I could not muster enough courage or strength to take my children to the parks, zoos, or museums. In my weakness, I cried out to the Lord for help. In his mercy, he gave us books.
That year, we read and read and read. Reading became a primary way we went “out.” We read as though our lives depended on it.
Reading for Dear Life
The Lord created a great abundance out of my poverty. A bountiful harvest sprung from seeds sown in weakness. Here are some lessons I gleaned from that year:
Reading or listening to stories is a learned delight. I read a book out loud for the first time after becoming a mother. Like motherhood, reading to my children felt awkward at first and did not come naturally to me. Likewise, I learned to listen to stories as an adult. Reading and listening were skills that took practice, but the goodness and pleasure of sharing books with my children was well worth the effort.
Reading helps us engage God’s world. Listening to stories together as a family has helped lengthen our attention spans and sharpen the ability to focus and mentally engage for long periods. When we stop to look up the definition of words, our vocabulary also grows. All these skills can deepen our understanding of God’s Word and his creation.
Reading creates the space for Bible study habits. This was the most unexpected and wonderful fruit from my year of weakness. Seeing that my children loved being read to, I wondered whether they would listen to the Bible with the same attentiveness. So, I began each day by reading the Bible to them. Every morning, I read one or two chapters out loud as they ate breakfast. Days turned into weeks that turned into years. We kept reading—learning to love God’s Word as life-giving and sustaining food for our souls.
Reading for the Light, in the Light
Reading to our children makes good sense. Even non-Christian parents can see the benefits of their children becoming word-lovers and book-lovers. But what sets Christian parents apart when it comes to training our young readers?
God’s people are word-lovers because Jesus is the visible Word. God’s children are book-lovers because God communicates himself and his promises through his Book.
In the spirit of the Westminster catechism, what is the chief end of all that we do, including reading? The chief end of reading is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. For the Christian family, the goal of reading together, then, is to behold God and read all books in communion with the Word made flesh. The difference between a Christian reader and a non-Christian reader is in why we read and how we read.
Christians read for communion with God. We hope not merely for our children to grow into serious readers but for our children to become readers rooted by streams of water who delight in the Word of the Lord and meditate on it day and night.[1] We pray that they would not merely have the opinion that the Word is sweet but that they would taste its sweetness. Reading the Word is active submission to the Spirit, who alone is able to do this saving, soul-transforming work and bring us into a relationship with God.
Christians read with the mind of Christ, who is the Light of the World. We strive to be discerning readers who read and think about books in light of Christ. One author puts it this way: “We must be determined to read the imperfect in light of the perfect, the deficient in light of the sufficient, the temporary in light of the eternal.”[2]
Cultivating Affections
Stories are to the soul as food is to the body. For a limited time, parents have authority over what our children eat and read. We have the authority to say “yes,” “no,” and “not yet.”
My firstborn hated vegetables for twelve years. Now fourteen, I am in awe that he somehow loves vegetables. It was (and still is) my motherly privilege and responsibility to introduce him to various vegetables and make them safe and somewhat delightful. I pureed them when he was a baby, cut them when he was a toddler, and learned to make vegetables more than palatable as he grew. I gave him a portion of greens and colors at every meal because vegetables were good for him.
Knowing why and how we read helps us decide when and what we read. As we introduce books to our children, we acknowledge that there are books that are good and suitable for them right now, books that may be good and suitable when they are more mature, and books that are not.
The willingness to distinguish truth from falsehood, the beautiful from the ugly, is a radical and counter-cultural act against the spirit of our age. As shepherds to our young readers, we need to help our children and teach them to “test everything,” to “hold fast what is good,” and to “abstain from every form of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22).
We cultivate their ability to think by reading to them and with them. We nurture a home culture where conversations about books are the norm. We offer our thoughts and listen to their responses:
I wonder what motivates Character A
Character B reminds me of Character C
I was very surprised by the way the story ended
Wow, that was very brave of Character D
We live in an age where children are breathing the air of relativism and narcissism. Pithy deceptions like “you determine your own truth,” “follow your heart,” and “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” are everywhere. We do not determine truth; the Lord reveals what is true. Follow Christ, not our own hearts, because human hearts are crooked and deceitful. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, because absolute beauty is found in the seemingly ugly cross where Christ died in our place.
From Reading to Beholding
Every story and every book, apart from God’s Story in God’s Book, falls short. As Charles Spurgeon puts it, “All other books might be heaped together in one pile and burned with less loss to the world than would be occasioned by the obliteration of a single page of the sacred volume [Scripture].”[3] Only the Bible is complete in truth and beauty. So, we lead our little readers to the green pastures and the still waters of God’s Word—early and often.
Though none can compare with the perfection of Scripture, books can either help or hinder our ability to understand the Great Story. Parents often wonder whether we are reading the “right” books. The “right” books are the ones we read with them. Years from now, they will remember that we read with them more than what we read with them. We are giving them ourselves.
As their parents, we get to be the first to introduce our children to beautiful and truth-filled books. We get to delight in reading to them for the Light and in the Light of Christ. We get to open books that possess the power to captivate, compel, and engage the senses. For a little while, we get to cultivate young readers’ appetites and palates to taste and discern what is good. We get to walk and talk with them through many valleys of the shadow of death, through the written word.
Jesus is the Great Shepherd, and we are his little readers. On the day of his resurrection, he walked a long distance with two disciples who did not recognize him. Of all the things he could have done or said that day, Jesus showed them how to read. He taught them how to read the books of Moses and the Prophets in light of the Messiah. That evening, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. In communion with Jesus, their eyes were opened, and they beheld God.
[1] Psalm 1:1-3
[2] Tony Reinke, Lit! A Guide to Reading Christian Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 28.
[3] Ibid., 27.
Reflection Questions
What are some of the false messages in picture books you’ve encountered in popular bookstores and local libraries?
How do you talk about false messages in the books you read with your children?
What are some books that captivate, compel, and engage the senses of you and your children?
Among these well-written books, which are the titles that clarify, enlighten, and enlarge the truth? Which of these contradict, distort, and subvert the truth?
Application Ideas
Choose a children’s book you’ve always wanted to read and read it aloud as a family.
Challenge yourself to read aloud with your children every day for a week, or every day for a month, or seventy-seven times this summer! Keep track of your progress on a calendar. Reward yourselves when you reach your goal.
Strike up a conversation about books (like an informal book report!) with these questions:
What does the character want?
What is keeping the character from having it?
What did the character do to get it?
What is the character most afraid of?
What surprises you about this story?
Read in fun places! Consider setting up a blanket, hammock, or tent in the backyard. Or take reading material to a park or beach. If you have a family road trip coming up, take along an audio book or two.
Choose a book with food in it (cookies, bacon, fish and bread, blueberries, cakes, vegetables) and have the children gather around to eat a snack while you read the story to them.
Choose one book of the Bible and read it out loud from beginning to end, one or two chapters a day. The length of the reading and the books depends on the ages of your children.
Create one or several book nooks in your home. Set out a basket of books with a soft chair with pillows and blankets next to it. Or, display a small bookshelf of books near a comfortable, well-lighted corner. We have library books downstairs and our own books upstairs. Surround yourselves with books.
