First, Margaret Kyle’s vibrant and lively artwork. The innocent joy and wonder her paintings communicate speak volumes to children, and to the child in all of us, about an open-hearted God whose love embraces the whole world and everything and everyone in it.
Ralph Milton’s stories are equally compelling. Being a grandfather with lots of grandfatherly experience may have something to do with it. But Ralph is also a truly gifted writer, who approaches the Bible primarily as a storyteller. And really, in a book like this, the story is everything, as Ralph himself explains in the Introduction.
I’m a storyteller, not a theologian or a Bible scholar. The two most important things I bring to the task of telling Bible stories for children are imagination and passion.
First, imagination.
Where the terse biblical text offers little detail, I add my own. Where names are missing, I invent them. Where connecting narrative is absent, I supply it. Then I add my own dash of drama and suspense and fun. Sometimes, almost the whole story comes from my imagination and almost none of it from the Bible, though I’ve tried very hard to preserve the intention of the scripture reading.
As a professional writer, my imagination is not tamed, but it is disciplined. I do my research. The details I imagine are checked to make sure they have textual, historical, and theological validity. I’ve taken many biblical courses, done graduate work in Israel, and read hundreds of books in order to be able to do this. But still, the imagination that weaves these stories out of the raw material of the Bible is wild and childlike, and some people will find that profoundly disturbing.
Second, passion.
I believe with a deep and profound passion that God wants us to be a joyful, just, and caring people. One of the ways (but by no means the only way) God chose to help us be that kind of people was to encourage a particular people (the Hebrews) at a particular time (the biblical era) to record the stories of their struggles and sorrows, their joys and hopes.
They collected all kinds of writings – legends, folklore, stories, poems, fiction, history, recipes, and laws, and a dash here and there of utter drivel – into a book which we call the Bible.
The Bible can be a source of insight and wisdom and fun for adults and children. If we’re open, God can speak to us through the stories of the Bible.
And when God speaks, it’s never boring.
What can I say but “Amen!”
