Going Green

With her own green highlighter, she started at the beginning: Genesis 1. It's the story we'd just studied in her Sunday school class, and for her bedtime story, she wanted to read it in her very own Bible.

We lay on her bed, under the patchwork quilt, just the two of us. Daughter and mom. Bible resting on daughter's legs.

She begins, highlighter poised: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth." She colors each sentence as she reads, stumbling over words like "formless" and "hovering," which she pronounces HOOVER-ing, like the vacuum.

"What's the Spirit of God, Mommy?" she asks. "Is that the Holy Spirit?"

"Yes, Lydia," I respond. "Isn't that cool? The Holy Spirit was there, even in the beginning."

She continues.

"Let there be light."

"And God saw that it was good."

"Let there be an expanse between the waters ..."

"And God saw that it was good."

Lydia's pace quickens. Her green highlighter traces each line. She looks at me in awe: "Mommy! That's just how you told us in Sunday School. It's right here! In my Bible!"

"Yes, Lydia. This is the same story. Go on, honey. You're doing great ..."

She continues, reading of the land producing vegetation. She snickers when she gets to the part about animals moving along the ground. (She knows how her mom fears certain reptiles.) Even when God saw the snakes, she instructs me, He saw that they were good.

Her highlighting continues, so rapidly that the lines she draws become crooked.

We reach the end of the chapter. God has seen all that He has made and declared it "very good."

The highlighter, I've told her before, is for her to use on the parts of the Bible she likes the most.

So she colored every word of Genesis, Chapter 1. The entire first chapter of Lydia's NIV Adventure Bible -- every word of it -- has been colored in green.

She likes all of it the most.

God saw all that Lydia had done. And it was very good.

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From the 2008 archives.