In our early years of parenting, Brian and I began to read a children’s Bible storybook aloud. I was trying to be a good mother, and wasn’t reading Bible stories part of being a good mother? That was when I began skipping big sections of Scripture. I wasn’t able to turn off my pathos. Noah and the Ark? All I could see in my mind were animals and people drowning in terror. Jericho? Forget your fun Sunday school songs, this was genocide. The story of Hannah, giving up her son Samuel to temple, broke my new-mother heart. I faltered before a God who would ask such a thing of a mother. I read the
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