(When our youngest daughter was just 1-1/2 years old, a Sunday School group invited me to speak to the children. What an opportunity!  The following is from that message to young children. I hope you enjoy it and can share it with some of your favorite kids.)

Once there was a little girl who lived with her Mommy and Daddy and her little brother, Jimmy.  They lived in a 2-room house. The house was built on a piece of swampy land.  Cattails grew in the back yard.

Most days she heard the cry of seagulls and saw the view of Superior, the lake so big that no one can see across it. When riding with her parents, she often could see choppy waves and whitecaps on the huge lake by her house. On hot days, she swam in it. The sandbar stretched out far into the lake, and yet the water only came up to her knees.  She loved to splash in it and play in the sand that blanketed the beach.

Artesian wells are not uncommon where she grew up. Cold, refreshing drinking water just bubbled up out of the ground all by itself. To those living in other parts of the world, the sights she saw as a child are special.

Sometimes her Daddy took her miles away from the lake into the thick birch and poplar forests.  They picked wild blueberries that grew ripe in July.  Black bears lived in the woods.  But she never saw one unless it was in a cage or at the dump where bears ate garbage for supper.  She wasn’t afraid of bears.  She was just glad that rattlesnakes did not live where she did.  Now that made her feel safe!

Many times Mommy took her and Jimmy to Sunday School.  She learned about many things, such as sin and hell, Jesus’ love and His death on the cross.  Sunday School helped her to want to please God even at her young age.

Hell, that terrible place for people who do not go to heaven, frightened her.   People had to sin to go there.  She knew that she had run away from Jimmy when he wanted to play with her.  Besides that, she remembered that she disobeyed Mommy and Daddy sometimes.  “Wasn’t that sin? Yes,” she thought, ” it was.”

Whatever could she do?  She did all she knew to do.  She said, “Forgive me, Jesus.”  But Jesus did not say anything back to her.  So she really did not know if He did or did not forgive her.

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