“Darkness and blackness and night are too often compared to lightness and whiteness and day and found deficient, but let us name the beauty and goodness and holiness of darkness and blackness and night.” The opening lines of God’s Holy Darkness sets the tone for the highly ambitious children’s book. Authors Sharei Green and Beckah Selnick deftly take to the task using scripture, theology and imagery to capture little reader’s imagination. As my young reader gasped quietly when she read it for the first time, “oh, this is beautiful, mommy. Not just the pictures but the words, the meaning.”
God’s Holy Darkness takes little readers and their adults through the many scriptures that center in God’s goodness revealed in the dark. From the way God drew the world out of darkness as a holy act, to Samuel’s calling in the dark, to the disciples gathering as day turned to night for the holy supper, this book weaves scriptures together to make one big argument–that God does holy, sacred work in the dark, so the dark is holy.
One of the things I love as I work to teach Biblical literacy at home is how scripture is used in God’s Holy Darkness (Bookshop | Amazon). There is a nice balance of popular stories and less common stories to get your little readers curious about the Bible. It also means that as a Christian Educator, this book can be slotted into several different lessons and connect to the scripture passage. I would love to do a multi-week darkness theme in winter and do activities that celebrate darkness like a flashlight scavenger hunt, writing prayers for night time and building kaleidoscopes.
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