Lowly things

A week or so ago, I was reading the Naaman story in 2nd Kings. Naaman is this "very important person", but he gets the very common and fatal disease leprosy. A Jewish servant girl of his suggests that a prophet in her country can heal him. So he and his entourage travel a long way and when they finally get to this prophet, the prophet a) won't come out to see him and b) through a messenger tells him to take a bath in the local river (vs. 10).

Naaman was really mad having had his expectations of lofty magic dashed to pieces (vs. 11). He kind of has a petulant metropolitan fit exclaiming

Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?” So he turned and went off in a rage (vs. 12).

So that's the back story to this line that caught my attention for a week

Naaman’s servants went to him and said, “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’! (vs. 13)”

 As I look over what I thought about my life from ages 10-20, I was oriented toward "great things". I pursued excellence and recognition. When I thought about what I wanted to do in life, I wanted to do things with awesome humanitarian merit. So being a missionary in a far off country was good. But solving for world peace was also ok.

But as any of the dozen people who read this blog know, that's not what I'm doing now at all. I'm a suburban mom who drives a minivan on nicely paved streets, in a friendly neighborhood, with good schools and convenient shopping. Like Naaman, this has felt like a downshift, a turn in the wrong direction. But instead I have been learning to live in a completely different dimension than I thought possible.

It used to be a black and white distinction between awesome or awful, advancing or retreating. We live in a culture of "dream big". I'm learning to dream deeper. When a girl has a baby and can't buy diapers, the need is obvious. But on my street, the needs are rarely that obvious but just as compelling.

We're into our third year at this address, and the sidewalk interactions are building a foundation of friendship that's allowing us unusual access into our neighbors lives. Our dreams are not about our neighborhood but our neighbors, the ones on our street. And I'm not thinking about how to solve world peace or start a movement, but how to bring living water to the dry places in the lives of my "common, suburban" friends.

I would be willing to move my family to the ends of the earth or some other "great thing" if God had asked that of us. But our ordinary, not glamorous, street is turning to be ok too, more than ok.

Picture books for young readers, a think out loud

Working for Zoobean and having two kids under 4, I have a lot of time to encounter and think about picture books for children.

Here are a couple points that I've been trying to sort through:

1. The reality on the ground in our home is that we have a 4 year old reading material for kids several years older.
2. Reports from other parents and the New York Times suggest that "real chapter books" are the goal, picture books are for babies and non-readers. 
3. We've heard rumors that publishers are responding to a market for young readers and are supporting books that are age appropriate in content but complex enough for children reading above grade level.

The "early reader" books aimed at children in school learning to read are really hit and miss in content for our daughter. This is true even within the subset of "early reader" books that don't just patently suck in content and illustration, particularly the movie spin offs. So within the subset that are generally good, the animal stories are better than that school oriented stories. Given that most kids learn to read after they go to school, I understand why there are school oriented stories, but in our situation, because she's reading before school there are references she totally doesn't understand, sometimes to the point where most of the story is inaccessible. 

Another young reader who's 6 months older than our daughter has been headed toward Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, that kind of stuff. I think whenever we get there, we'll have a better chance to see if there really are new books that are written for young, advanced readers. Thus far, those rumors are just rumors. At this point, just because our child might be able to read Harry Potter books, I don't think we're going to rush there. Just the other night, we had a tearful discussion about death, heaven, and such. At her age, she's just very literal and concrete. 

With that literalness and concreteness, my current strategy is to send her back into the regular population of picture books. This ends up addressing several issues. First, sometimes, she's just so enthralled with sounding out words, I'm not sure she's working through what's happening in the story. The pictures provide an anchor point for the content. 

Second, she recently announced that she only wants to read "Level 1" readers because they are for Pre-K and she's in Pre-K. The levels vary widely by publisher, but she's comfortably reading most Level 2 books and Level 3 books are simply taxing on her stamina, not her ability to read. So getting out of the "Level #" books will remove this issue. Also within picture books, there is a wide variation in the complexity of content and vocabulary, so there are certainly books that will work for her reading abilities and emotional development.

Third, some of the regular picture books are beautifully illustrated where this is rarely true for early reader books. Our daughter is very sensitive to beauty and I want to foster that particularly for her. But I think that even if she weren't, there's a missed opportunity for keeping our kids engaged in multiple dimensions of beauty if we rush her to picture-less books. She'll be there soon enough and for decades to come. 

Anyways, that's our current approach. With such limited data and experience, I don't want to prescribe this for every family, but I'd love to see more families graduate their new readers of any age from the controlled "early reader" books BACK to regular picture books rather than making a beeline for picture-less chapter books.