Reflecting the True Story

Dannah Gresh: Kathryn Butler believes in the power of reading great stories out loud to children.

Kathryn Butler: No fiction can replace God’s inspired Word, but the right stories—those that applaud goodness in the face of terror, hope against all hope, and celebrate the just, the true, and the lovely—can help point our kids to the one true Story.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, co-author of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, for July 25, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Are you the parent of little ones? Even if you don’t have children, do you have younger nieces or nephews? Or do you rub shoulders with little ones on a regular basis, say, in a daycare or classroom setting? You’re in for a treat today and tomorrow! Here’s Nancy to set up our topic and introduce our guest. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Dannah, thank you!

You know, as Christians, our faith centers on the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s the beautiful story of the entire Bible. God created us good, in a perfect environment, to be in a love relationship with Him. But through Adam, sin entered and corrupted and distorted everything—condemning us all to suffer and die under God’s holy wrath. So what we were made to do—worship and glorify God—was messed up. 

But God in His mercy and grace provided a way for that love relationship to be restored. He sent forth His Son, Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin, to live the perfect life we are unable to live on our own, to die as our perfect substitute, to be raised to life in power, and to come again someday to take us home to live with Him forever in a world where all things are made new, enjoying that perfectly-restored love relationship. 

There you have it in a nutshell, what we call that the good news—the gospel. All of history revolves around those important themes: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. And our guest today argues that all good literature, all good stories contain elements of those themes in them. 

Today and tomorrow we’re going to hear a message from Dr. Kathryn Butler. You may remember her. She was on this program some weeks ago to tell her story of retiring from her career as a trauma surgeon to take up homeschooling her small children and writing books. You’ll find a link to that episode in the transcript of this program at ReviveOurHearts.com, or on the Revive Our Hearts app.

Kathryn and her husband, Scott, live in Massachusetts. They have a son and a daughter, and Kathryn has authored several books, two that draw on her experience as a doctor, and a trilogy of fantasy books for middle school readers called The Dream Keeper Saga. 

Kathryn spoke in a breakout session at our recent True Woman conference last fall on the whole subject of how great stories can help us point children to the beautiful, best story of all, the gospel.

Kathryn: I’d like to first start off by asking a question for everybody to reflect upon. You can write it down if you want. You can just think about it.

If you would, please, think back to your childhood and latch upon an example of a story that really resonated with you. Think back to one that lit sparks in your heart and mind.

• What story was it?
• Where were you when you first read it?
• What made your heartbeat quicken?
• What were the elements of that story that lingered and that bring your heart a thrill even now as you think about it?
• Why did that story matter?

Have you got one?

So, when I asked myself that question, I think of sitting belly down on my pink shag carpet in the 1980s when I was about seven or eight years old with jaw agape as I read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for the first time. I came to the scene where Eustace Scrubb, the ornery kid who seems like he’s an antagonist at the beginning of the book, finds himself locked in a dragon’s skin.

And desperate to free himself, he takes his own claws, and he scratches and he scratches, and the scales fly off, and there’s another layer underneath. He does it again, and he scratches, and he scrapes, and it hurts, and there’s still another layer underneath. And he becomes frantic.

I remember sitting there reading. I started to have chest tightness myself as I panicked along with him. What could he do? How could he save himself from this? What hope was there?

And then, Aslan, the great lion, who was not faith, but good, came. In one motion tore that skin off of him and washed him clean and Eustace became new.

I wasn’t blessed to grow up in the church, so when I read that story, I had no language for the exquisite brush strokes in which Lewis had just described the idea behind the gospel. Yet, still, it struck a chord in my soul. I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t have language for it. But somehow I knew when I read that passage in that story that I had witnessed something wondrous. I had been pointed to someone greater than myself, someone or something that was true and good.

And it took thirty years later when, by God’s grace, I’d been brought to Christ, and I was seated between my own two kids on the couch to read that narrative again. And as very frequently happens in my household while reading books, I burst into tears and slap my son’s knee and say, “Do you know what this is?” (My kids are used to this.)

So he swallowed his Goldfish, and he’s, like, “Yeah, Mom. It’s Jesus saving Eustace from his sin. Can you keep going?” (laughter)

So, his cynicism aside, I discovered that that moment that had thrilled me so much at the age of seven, and which had stayed with me through the decades, was my first glimpse of the gospel. When I wandered through Narnia in that enchanted land, I had my first glimpse of God’s glory through the lens of an author who loved God. I knew for the first time the One who so loved us that He came to save us all. It was an echo of the Great Story.

The best stories that we read to our kids do that. They’ve got a power to enchant young minds and enliven their imagination. They form our kids’ first concept of what it means to be courageous, to be heroic, and to show sacrificial love, and to do good.

And in the very best circumstances, the tales that are carefully tucked into the books that we read to our kids as we tuck them into bed at night can point us to the very best Story (with a capital “S”), the true Story, the happy ending for which we all yearn.

I’m going to be talking a lot about Tolkien and Lewis, so if you don’t like them, I’m sorry, but they are the ones who have explicitly talked about this, so I have to reference them a lot. But J.R.Tolkien especially believed that the very best stories resonate with gospel truth.

You might know that he famously brought Lewis to Christ through a discussion about myths. The story goes that they were walking through the grounds of Oxford University at 2 o’clock in the morning, because when you’re in your twenties, you can do such things like walk around in the dark and talk about myths. (laughter)

Lewis was an atheist at the time. He was lamenting that the myths that he loved, the mythologies he loved, were not rooted in reality. He used a beautiful expression for it, and said that it grieved him that there was nothing true about them, although breathed through silver.

And Tolkien said, “What are you talking about?” 

And he told Lewis and shared the gospel and said, “Christ is the true myth. Christ is the full revelation of God. And the reason that any great story resonates with you is because it’s touching a chord from that true great Story.” He said, “All other great stories merely echo that truth and strive to capture it.”

He compared stories to prisms. He said that “just as a prism splits white light into its individual wave lengths, so an author who’s fallen in sin, nevertheless, when he writes a great story, we see fragments of God’s truth in it—corrupted, but still fragments of that truth.”

All throughout when you read the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy with a mind alert to gospel themes, that profound conversation is not surprising. But it’s astonishing to know that this is the conversation that brought Lewis to Christ when you consider how far reaching his influence was for generations of Christians, knowing that it was a conversation about stories.

But then, again, it makes sense because the Bible is one great, beautiful, intricately woven story that God, by His divine inspiration, has given us over millennia. Jesus taught in parables, in part, because they linger in the mind so much longer after the information and the lesson fades. Facts about an anchor float away, but stories make them stick.

All throughout Tolkien’s work, we see echoes of the Christian narrative, echoing back to his own belief that they’re intertwined, that Christianity is a true story. For example, a broken people battle against an irrepressible evil. You have Frodo as the humble, suffering hero who saves Middle Earth, when he’s the most unlikely person you’d expect.

You have Gandalf, the teacher, who’s beloved, who gives his life to save others and then rises again.

The Trilogy glitters with these themes, reflecting Tolkien’s belief, as he articulated in his essay on fairy stories, that the peculiar quality of joy in successful fantasy can be explained by a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium—that was his word for the gospel—in the real world.

In other words, good stories delight us because they reflect the true Story, and they point to the ultimate happy ending: our adoption as God’s children through Christ.

So how do we harness these riches for our kids? How do we reap the treasures of story as we fulfill our calling to disciple our kids to know the Good Shepherd?

Ample research highlights how read-alouds nourish kids’ minds. In 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics actually recommended that all pediatricians recommend parents read to their kids, and they cited benefits to brain development and parent/child relationships.

And in her book The Enchanted Hour, Megan Coxgurden, who’s the Wall Street Journal’s children’s book critic, goes into exhaustive detail about the far-reaching effects of reading aloud on language development, on literacy, on social emotional skills. She calls it a magic elixir. And for the Christian parent, that elixir can also nourish a child’s soul.

I first glimpsed the power of great read-alouds to enrich our gospel teaching while reading The Fellowship of the Ring with my kids. They were eating peanut butter and jelly, and we reached the point where they are in Moria, running away from their enemies, and the Fellowship blast across the Bridge of Khazad-dûmwith the Balrog, the ancient demon from the deep in hot pursuit.

And Gandalf pauses and whips around to face him so that the Fellowship can escape. And in that great face off, if you remember from the movies, “You shall not pass the staff.” He puts his staff down, the bridge gives way. He shouts back to the Fellowship, “Fly! You fools. Save yourselves.” And then the Balrog descends, and his whip lashes around Gandalf’s ankle, and the beloved wizard is drawn into the abyss.

And I paused. I looked at my kids and worried. I thought, Was this too much? Was this going to overwhelm their sensitive minds? Was I going to be nursing them through nightmares tonight?

So I held my breath, and my son (you’ll catch a theme here) chews and swallows, and he looks at me, and he’s, like, “Mom, I think he gave himself to save the others, kinda like Jesus did for us.”

Whew! 

So moments like this have been at the pulsing center of our read-aloud time over the years and have offered such joy and such opportunities to talk about the truth of Christ.

I’m going to list off some examples, and you’ll hear, again, a lot of Tolkien and Lewis, but there will be others I’ll talk about during the talk.

So, an abridged version of Oliver Twist elicited comments about how we’re made in God’s image, and how we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, and how we’re to have special concern for the orphan and the widow.

And, actually, Dickens is ripe for these discussions all the time. If you pick an abridged version that you trust, it’s wonderful to have these kinds of discussions.

The Ring of Power in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy is a fantastic metaphor for sin where we actually get a visualization of what sin does to us: that it entices us even as it corrupts and destroys us. We see how Frodo is burdened by it even though he feels more and more bound to it as time goes on. We see how it deforms and corrupts Gollum into a creature that’s unrecognizable.

It offers kids a tangible understanding of: this is what sin is. We crave it. We want it. But it destroys us.

My son was scared during the pandemic. Stories actually also served us as a life raft. So early in the pandemic in 2020, I went back for a short time to work in the I.C.U. because cases were surging in Boston, and the governor had asked physicians to come out of retirement to help. My kids were old enough to understand what was going on and to be scared. And specifically, my son was very worried for my welfare.

It was early in the pandemic. We didn’t know how COVID was, how communicable it was. We just knew it was making people really, really sick very quickly.

We were so ignorant. I had a bucket of bleach (this is embarrassing) in my garage. I’d come home, and I’d wash myself in bleach because I didn’t want to pass anything on to my kids. It was just very early.

He was scared. It actually churned up a lot of doubts about God’s goodness in his head. And our first stop was to the book of Job, which we went through over the course of that year, which was so vital because it gave him a framework and understanding for the fact that God’s goodness endures even in the face of suffering and that He’s at work in ways that we can’t comprehend. He’s at work for our good and His glory.

But what also helped in the moment was that I continued to read aloud to my kids. I was working nights. I’d come home and crash. I’d get up, be with my kids, and then I’d go back to work. We were reading The Return of the King.”And it was that fantastic scene when Minas Tirith is under siege, and it’s described as gloom and despair. All seemed lost.

And then the Rohirrim come sweeping in over the plains. And Tolkien’s language is gorgeous. He described the air changing and a wind coming in off the sea and dawn breaking, and the morning had returned.

And I read it, and I started to cry again. I looked at my son who was in tears. And I said, “Bub, what’s going on?”

He said, “It’s just makes me really hopeful.”

And I said, “Do you know what? You’re absolutely right! And do you know what it reminds me of? Where’s our hope? Our hope is in that Jesus will make all things new, that no matter what we’re going through right now, however dark it is, just like Minas Tirith. He will return, and He will wipe away every tear from every eye, and death and suffering will be no more.”

And that was a life raft for us. It got us through that day. It got us through the next week. And it was all because we had Scripture. We clung to Scripture, and we could see echoes of it through the stories we read.

We read Robinson Crusoe, and my son and I rejoiced along with the main character in God’s amazing provision and providence.

So I would say that literature, from the nineteenth century especially, if you have kids that are old enough that you can walk through the original version, are really rich with very overt frank references to God’s goodness. When you read the abridged versions, they scrub it all out. But if you go back to the originals, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Heidi have very beautiful, to-the-point, detailed descriptions of God’s mercy and providence through some hard things. They were wonderful to read together.

One night we read Voyage of the Dawn Treader on the couch. I had my moment. My daughter, who was only six at the time, had hers. There’s that great scene where an albatross appears in the sky to guide Lucy Pevensie and her friends out of danger. And then, Aslan’s voice booms over the sea and says, “Courage, dear one.”

My daughter looks at me, and she’s, like, “Mom, that kinda reminds me of the Holy Spirit and God coming out of the clouds.”

And I said, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Our hearts broke at the sacrificial love of Helmer in The Green Ember Series. And we rejoiced when the rabbits returned to the mended wood again and when the rightful king returned to the throne.

We similarly had moments of discussion and gratitude and rejoicing when we read The Wingfeather Saga, and how Janner gives his life for his brother at the end and how the lost kingdom is restored and everything is named as the king comes as the second Adam.

I’ve spoken much of Tolkien and Lewis, but the fact is that stories from a multitude of traditions and authors can offer these riches provided they touch upon the right themes—provided they touch upon truth with themes of sacrifice, redemption, love, and radical hope, and provided they remind us of the Savior who laid down His life for us.

No fiction can replace God’s inspired Word, but the right stories, those that applaud goodness in the face of terror, hope against all hope, and celebrate the just, the true, and the lovely, can help point our kids to the one true story.

When we apply the truth of Scripture to conversations about great books, we open our children’s eyes in fresh ways. They can see God’s majesty, His mercy, and His incredible grace at work daily. In other words, we point them to the gospel.

And so, in some way, reading and discussing great books with our kids and weaving our knowledge of Scripture into it can be a ministry unto itself as we disciple them and point them to Christ.

So how do we do it?

How do we reap these joys and wonders for our kids?

How do we make the most of this read-aloud time and point them to the true happy ending?

I’d like to humbly offer five suggestions.

The first, I think, will be obvious to everyone in this room which is: give them Scripture first.

The fact that Tolkien has such an enormous secular fan base, Amazon Rings of Power . . . anybody? . . . demonstrates that when approached as isolated entities without the undergirding of God’s inspired Word, we can’t instruct our kids in the gospel. The stories by themselves will not do it.

Think back to when I encountered Narnia for the first time. My soul responded to something, but I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t until I knew the gospel and knew what Christ had done that it clicked, and I could understand.

Stories can enrich the imagination and fan the sparks of a child’s understanding into a flame, but we need to ignite that first with the illuminating light of God’s Word. Great stories point to the gospel only if our kids first know the Bible.

The Bible is clear from Deuteronomy 6:6–7, that we’re to infuse our kids’ days with Scripture, allowing it to spill over into every moment, as we walk in the way, lie down and rise, and let it seep into what we read with them, what we laugh about, and what we share.

So, what I would recommend is: teach your kids that God’s Word is a “lamp to their feet and a light to their path,” from Psalm 119. And then help them perceive glimmers of that light in the stories they read.

The goal is to supplement your family’s devotions, not replace them, and to let the gospel seep into the moments of enchantment that naturally populate your kids’ days.

The second is to know your kids, which should also seem obvious.

The age range on the back of any paperback is only a guideline. Some kids can’t pry themselves away from an adventure story, and others find moments of peril too overwhelming and too frightening.

My kids love The Mistmantle Chronicle series, which is another fantastic series. That’s just coming out, newly released. They’re from twenty years ago, and they’re just being re-released by a Christian author. And when we read them, I thought, Oh, this is great, anthropomorphic animals with a mean character and a heroic squirrel. It will be great. But my daughter was just flooded with tears when we first read it because one of the characters died, and she was really sensitive to animal cruelty.

So, the point is, it takes a discerning eye to present material that will excite and educate, but not terrify. So, when possible, pick a story with which you’re already familiar so that you can edit sections on the fly that you think will be difficult or just save it for when the kids are older.

I’ve found editing on the fly is also very useful when you’re reading books that were written decades ago. That might have value, but which can have some culturally insensitive passages. If you know they’re coming, you can either address them with your kids and talk about how we’re all made in God’s image, and we need to love neighbors, and this is not a good example of that. Or, if they’re not mature yet to have that kind of discussion, to just be able to edit it out as you read.

Kid sensitivity is varied, and you know what best kinds of books will delight the unique kids in your life, and just know that the best stories will inspire and challenge without causing distress.

Nancy: That’s some practical counsel for parents and, really, anyone who works with children on a regular basis. We heard part one of a message from Kathryn Butler, in a breakout session from a recent True Woman conference. We’ll hear the rest of what she shared tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

Kathryn mentioned Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 6 and 7. I’d like to read that super important passage. After the grand statement of who God is, and after instructing His people to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, and might, God said this through His servant Moses:

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

Let me stop right there. God’s speaking to the children of Israel as He’s giving them the Law. But what about you? Is God’s Word on your heart? Are you reading it? Meditating on it? Memorizing? it He goes on.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, [This speaks of formal instruction. Notice the word “diligently.” It takes intentionality and some work! But then there’s the informal, too.] and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

In other words, all the time! Coming, going, sitting standing, lying down, or reading out loud on the couch. And the passage goes on to talk about displaying God’s Word in standard, everyday places that we pass by all the time, so we can never forget it.

So think about this. What’s something you can adjust or put in place in your family or with the children you interact with to help God’s Word be more regular, more present in their lives—after it is regular and present in your life? As Kathryn said, the stories you read to them ought to supplement God’s Word, not replace it. That’s so good!

Well, I’d like to point you to the transcript of this program. There you’ll find information about the books Kathryn has authored, along with the list of recommended stories she mentions in her talk. Again that’s in today’s transcript at ReviveOurHearts.com, or on the Revive Our Hearts app. 

Dannah: You know, Nancy, I thought of one place we can post Scripture in our homes where we’ll constantly see it, and that’s on our refrigerator! 

Nancy: Yes, great idea.

Dannah: And we have just the magnetic notepad that’s perfect for this. This month it’s our gift to you when you make a donation of any amount to support Revive Our Hearts. You can find out more about this notepad from Revive Our Hearts at our website.

You mentioned the formal instruction, as well. Well, on our website is also where you’ll see information about the Summer Bible Study Sale. It starts today, and continues through August 14. 

Summer is in full swing, but fall will be here before you know it. Get ready for the fall Bible study season with the Revive Our Hearts Bible Study Sale.

Whether you’re looking for something to help you finish your summer off strong or if you are getting ready for your ladies’ fall Bible study, we've got you covered.

Again, all the information is at our website, ReviveOurHearts.com, or you can call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

Tomorrow Kathryn Butler will be back to finish up her list of five ways we can use great stories to point kids to the gospel. 

Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth helps you help others discover freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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