A Little Boy's Question

In the early 1990s, while teaching in the first and second grade Sunday School class, I thought about the fact that we never seemed to spend enough time teaching about Creation, so I decided to devote the next six months to that subject.

I made a list of Creation topics for the next 26 weeks and put them in the order of the Creation week, decorated the classroom with posters illustrating verses about Creation, hung paper birds and clouds from the ceiling, and lined the window ledge with books from the public library that showed the wonders of what God had made.

Our class had few girls and lots of little boys. On the first Sunday of our study, several boys arrived first and sat down at the table. One of them said, “This room looks different from the way it did last week.”

I said, “Yes. What do you think we are going to study?”

One little boy said, “The universe?”

I said, “Well . . . sort of. We are going to study about all the things that God made.”

Another little boy said, “God didn’t make the universe, did He?”

My jaw and the other teacher’s jaw dropped to the floor. We knew this little boy. He was from a godly home and came to church all the time. He wasn’t a troublemaker. I was confident that in his seven years of coming to church he had heard that God made the world. Realizing that the room looked more like a schoolroom than a Sunday School room, I wondered, “Has he been listening to what he hears at school and on the Discovery Channel and put that in one compartment and what he has learned at Sunday School in another?”

A six-month study and a little boy’s question spurred a lifelong passion in me. While homeschooling John, Bethany, and Mary Evelyn, we took walks in state parks and looked at spider webs and watched Moody videos and went to Mammoth Cave. I shared lessons about Creation with more and more children, and our children taught alongside me.

I taught those two Sunday School quarters long before the Internet sources for Bible research we have today were available, but at the church building Ray had access to a program in which I could search for every verse in the Bible that included a certain word. As I searched for key Creation words, such as bird and water and cloud and sea and so forth to share with my class, I came to realize that God created things in the beginning, and then in the rest of the Bible, He used those things to perform miracles or to teach us lessons. Then, when Jesus came, He did the same thing. He calmed the storm. He walked on water. He told parables about sheep and birds and lilies. Because we live with these Creations every day, these illustrations help us to understand what God wants us to know.

Moses told the Israelites:

Give ear, O heavens, and let me speak;
And let the earth hear the words of my mouth.

Alaska Fjord 2014