Blessed are the Candymakers

Easter is over but the story continues --

This is from Jim LaPage's Word series, which is awesome.
Check it out by clicking here. 

It's one that's really meant to be told again and again, and in the past few weeks we told it before bedtime, in the bathtub, at the dinner table, in the car, because Henry asked, again and again.

We stumbled through it at first -- how to tell a story so intense and cosmic and weird to a little boy, how to give him some shred of understanding. What do you want a 3-year-old to get from the story of Easter? What do you want anyone to get?

Birth, life, teaching, death, resurrection. A narrative -- but to what end? The answer found me before I could overthink it -- the answer Jesus gave an expert in the Mosaic law when he asked for the greatest commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind," and "Love your neighbor as yourself."

And so we told him, again and again: Jesus taught us to love God and to love other people. The whole story is about that.

I hope he spends some time on those ideas as he grows up, keeps them at the heart of the Easter story, wrestles with their meaning and their execution.

It's fascinating, though, to see how he processes it now, to see how that intense, cosmic, weird story comes out in the preschooler mind. He loves supervillains: What were the names of those guys who didn't like Jesus? He adores his friends: What did Jesus and his friends play together?

And this:

Me: "... and so he went around the land talking to people and teaching them and helping them."
Henry: "He helped them? What'd he do?"
Me: "If they were sick, he healed them. If they were hungry, he gave them food. If they were thirsty, he gave them something to drink."
Henry: "If there was time for dessert, he gave them some candy."

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Happy (perpetual) Easter.

Check out the rest of the series: Good Egg Hunting, Euaggelion, 49 Years of Easter Awesomeness, Ode to a Marshmallow Peep