Friday, October 10, 2008

Theology from a childrens book

Each night my kids each get to pick out a story for me to read. My daughter usually chooses a chapter in a book (right now we are reading The Princess and Curdie by George Macdonald) while Junior chooses a storybook.


The only exception is when it is way past their bedtime, I choose one book. Last night we had our 4-H club meeting and it was late when we finally got home. So I picked one they hadn't heard before but it was one of my favorites as a child.


The Little Red Caboose is about a caboose on a train that doesn't like being at the end of the train. Kids wave at the engine, the flat cars, the coal cars, the oil cars, and the passanger cars but they have walked away by the time he gets there. One day though, the train is going up a steep hill and it goes slower, and slower, and s-l-o-w-e-r, the car right in front of the caboose warns him that they are going to start going backward but the caboose puts on the brakes until 2 shiny black engines come behind him and help push the train up the hill. They tell the caboose that he is a hero because without him, the train would have gone backward down the hill so then he is glad that he is at the end of the train. All the kids wave more to the caboose because he is a hero.


So what does that have to do with theology? Just this, sometimes we are unhappy with where we are in life. Just because we think we are in (what we think is) an unimportant position, does not mean that we are not where God wants us. He could have us in that place to do some great work, then again we may never know why we were put there. But God has put us there for a reason.

1 comment:

  1. Very cool story - I'll have to look for that for our library someday. :-) One of my all-time favorites was The Little Engine that Could.

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