Only a preacher’s kid will wind up with 4 Bibles before he or she turns 3!! I did not grow up as a PK and remember my first Bible being a Gideon’s NT I recieved at some point in elementary school. Nevertheless, Maddie seems to have ended up with 4 different storybook Bibles and a book of Pslams (paraphrased for children).
Tiny Bear’s Bible (Zonderkidz.com, ISBN-10: 1-8598-5852-X) was her first. It’s a great rhyming board book, centered around God’s promises and His care for us. Not a whole lot to say about it other than it was a favorite night-time read for us for a good while – it was easy to read all the way through pretty quickly, especially when you figured you could read every other story from time-to-time.
Kimberly and I wanted to find another Bible for Mads just for some variation from Tiny Bear. My Toddler Bible (Tyndale Kids, ISBN-10: 1-4143-2013-2) was a good solution. It had the same stories from her first Bible, but also included others like “Joseph’s Big Brothers” and “Jonah and the Big Fish.” I had to remind myself that this was no longer a rhyming book, but more a storybook. I loved how it introduced each person in the story – “This is…baby Moses, David, Daniel…these are the wise men…”
Somewhere along the way, we decided she needed yet another different Bible. Reading to her at night was now a habit and we were looking for something that gave more detail and might be more fun to read in bed. The Read with Me Bible for Toddlers (Zonderkidz.com, ISBN 978-0-310-71877-2) read like a comic book or graphic novel and some some great illustrations throughout the book. I thought it did a great job painting a picture for us, now that Maddie is at a place where she likes to look at the book with me while we read. For so long I was able to get a way with just reading beside her bed and she’d go to sleep along the way. Now I am in bed with her, she’s on my lap, making me hold the book at a 10-2 position (yes, like I am driving a car!) and she turns the pages – sometimes when I ask her to! This is going to be a fun Bible to go back through with her soon.
Our (Kimberly’s and my) favorite has become the Jesus Storybook Bible (Zonderkidz.com, ISBN 978-0-310-70825-4). The illustrations are great, the stories are better. Like the other 3, the Jesus Storybook Bible walks us from the Old Testament to the New Testament. It is a long storybook, but every story points us to Jesus, just like the Bibles you and I read. Take, for example, the opening story about Creation. The author writes, “God looked at everything he had made. ‘Perfect!’ he said. And it was. But all the stars and the mountains and oceans and galaxies and everything were nothing compared to how much God loved his children. He would move heaven and earth to be near them. Always. Whatever happened, whatever it cost him, he would always love them. And so it was that the wonderful love story began…”
We’ve really taken this “hiding God’s Word in our heart” thing seriously. We want the stories about Jesus to be so familiar to Maddie and Hudson. These aren’t the only stories they hear at night. There are Dr. Seuss books-a-plenty and nursery rhymes and classic children’s stories. We are just taking advantage of the time we have right now to invest as much as we can into what we know is forever. I hope you don’t have as much trouble finding a Bible for your kids as we have. Trouble is not the correct word. We like the variety and we like the fun these books have put in to telling these great stories.
Good journeying!
