What You Can Learn from Calvin and Hobbes about the Message and the Medium

Fred Sanders is a systematic theologian. This post about Calvin and Hobbes is great.

• Anybody who has a message that they care about communicating should pay attention to the great lesson taught by Calvin and Hobbes: The lesson is that not every message can be communicated in every medium.Yes, I mean Bill Watterson’s comic strip about the tiger and his boy, not the theologian and the philosopher.

This is such a clarifying idea. Read more.

Why We Need More Dinosaurs like Lewis

Art Lindsley writes about Lewis’s ability to resist progress for progress’s sake. It’s good:

• Some words are more slippery than they seem.In C. S. Lewis’s TheVoyage of the Dawn Treader, King Caspian encounters Gumpas, the Governor of the Lone Islands. Gumpas tells Caspian that the slave trade practiced in his domain is an “essential part of the development of the island.”

  “Tender as my years may be,” says Caspian, “I do not see that it brings into the islands meat or bread or beer or wine or timber or cabbages or books or instruments of music or horses or armour or anything else worth having. But whether it does or not, it must be stopped.”

It’s a really worth-while read. Read more.

Simplicity Takes the Most Doing

David Swanson at Signs of Life has an important reminder both for creators and for everyone:

• But I have a better reason than mere prejudice for choosing pastry as the epitome of baking: It illustrates one of the chief paradoxes of life. If you were to poll the man in the street on the question: Which is harder to accomplish- something simple or something complex? you would no doubt find that most people take it for granted that simple things are easy and complex ones difficult.

We have to be careful, judicious about how we construe greatness. Read more.

Why Your Soul Needs You to Be Creative

Ann Voskamp pulls some creativity lessons from watching her son paint.

• Malakai and his paints sprawl across the table like a bit of the sky run all down.These thousand colors in rain.

  That’s the way Malakai paints, dabbing in the underbelly of the darks, lining the greys with white light. He pulls this rainbow of colors back tight and he shoots for stars, right there on canvas.

  Even his hands boldly wear it, shades of the sky.

Read more.

Four Ways to Encourage Imagination

A guest poster at Steady Mom provides some help with encouraging imagination.

• On a recent beautiful fall afternoon, I sat in the driveway with my two girls, who were happily playing in a plastic container filled with sand.  The 19-month-old was stirring “soup” in a small bowl while her 4 1/2 year old sister poured “slop” into her bucket to feed her pig, Wilbur. Few things are more fun than watching your children’s imaginations in full swing.  Indeed, imagining seems to come naturally for most kids.  And it’s a huge asset for any child.

Some good, simple tips. Read more.

Around the Warren:

Cricket in the Jar

James Witmer introduces us to a song from Chris Slaten (a.k.a. Son of Laughter)

• Sometimes it feels my parenting experience is made up of just two alternating moments.One moment, I really doubt all the, “Don’t hit your sister; Yes, you have to eat all of it; Are you listening to me? But I asked YOU to do it; JUST STOP SHOUTING! – I mean, please don’t shout,” is going to end before my sanity does.

  The other moment I can feel time and opportunity slipping away from me, and there is so much GOOD I haven’t shared with them.

Awesome. Read more.

A Dramatic Narrative that Re-plots our Identity

Paul Boekell delivers a brilliant quote from Michael Horton.

Brilliant.

Three Cheers for Wordless Books

Laura Peterson has been on a journey into children’s books without words. She introduces some.

• I’ve made a new discovery in the past year that I want to share with you all: WORDLESS PICTURE BOOKS. They are a revelation to me, let me tell you. I am very much a “word person;” a well-written turn of phrase delights me like nothing else. I have several dictionaries in my house and I watch the National Spelling Bee every year.

Read on!

Tumbleweed Thompson’s Youth Tonic

Glenn McCarty writes, Joe Sutphin illustrates:

• It was a matter of great importance, and the morning wind that carries the mist and the butterflies carried the news in a kind of dance, like the laugh of the first baby, when it broke into a thousand pieces and was the beginning of faeries. But what had been born was only a little stag, with wide, glassy eyes, uncertain on its knobbly legs. There were stags born in the forest every day, and doe-fawns too, with brushy eyelashes.

A fun story in a fun voice. Read it.

Something to Do with Your Kids:

Summer is coming! To help, Deal Seeking Mom put together a whole list of budget-friendly summer activities. Read more.

And Something Fun to Watch

Do you have 41 seconds? Do you have kids? Combine those two things. Someone will laugh.

Thank you for reading. We’re on your side.