Superman and Supernatural
God and Superman; I thought that might get your attention. A recent educational “study” has reported that children are not developing imagination and creativity skills. Yes, another study we don’t need. Any parent who fights the media battle knows that it is hard to get your child away from dictated, pre-meditated entertainment, even at many schools. The real emphasis from the study also dragged up a decades-old problem. Verbal skills among elementary students are at an all-time low. Of course, they recommended limiting media and reading more books. Another no-brainer! The lack of imagination and creativity skills finds its root in non-reading. While you may not like Dr. Seuss, he was certainly imaginative! Books open doors to worlds and ideas none of us can offer every child. They are a direct, proven link to verbal skills. Seeing complete, correct sentences in print translates to writing the same way. The same is true of oral language and vocabulary growth. You’re still wondering what this has to do with superman. The analogy is that as Christians, fostering creativity and imagination is what will help us in some ways to explain a supernatural God. The child who has proper direction in creativity will not dwell on what’s untrue, but with the realm outside immediate reality. Our God is a superman. There is the matter of faith, of the Trinity to explain, both of which require the kind of thinking that goes beyond human reality. Children begin to understand God and the universe He created as they begin to understand the power and omniscience it took to put it in place. As they imagine the workings of the human brain or the functions of the body, they grasp ideas beyond their finite, sensory realm. These are the kinds of imagination we must foster. Start your child’s journey into imagination with A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh series. Other authors I like are C. S. Lewis, Beatrix Potter, Anne Rockwell, John Steptoe, Rudyard Kipling, and Beverly Cleary to name a very few.