Here's the first part of the adventure. Take off 20+ years of religious glasses and really look at David, the man after God's own heart (Passion gone right. Passion gone wrong.) and just make observations. Look at the grubby details of life as a shepherd, life as the youngest of a testosterone-filled household. Life as a soldier. Life as a king. A womanizer. Write a long list of honest observations. Would you let him join your church? What was he good at? What was he bad at? Or how did he succeed in men's eyes? In God's? How did he fail?
Not that God condoned breaking His commandments but His stories are full of some pretty unsavory situations and less than perfect people. If you let kids make the honest observations that only kids can make about our religious icons - the heroes of scripture - without our grown-up interpretations you may discover things about God that you've never seen before. Especially if you listen to kids who didn't grow up in the church, who didn't teethe on these stories. Some of the stories of scripture aren't appropriate for young children or even elementary aged although in today's world maybe we need to rethink that if there's a child in the story. But what about middle grade? What about teens and young adults? There are stories in scripture that adults don't even explore but they're there.They're in the word. God gave us these stories. What do we do with them?
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