pat loughery

Last night, before bed, I read four stories for Kaileigh. We read a personalized book that her grandparents had gotten her that talked about flying over a magical rainbow to a dragon and getting a birth stone and a birth flower; Bedtime for Bunny (which has really fun tactile pieces – touch a silky thing, touch a wooly thing..); and then a Wonder Woman book with three push-buttons for recorded sound inputs.

The fourth was a kids’ bible that she has (she has several). This one is Old Testament stories only, and Kaileigh couldn’t decide between wanting to hear the story of David and Goliath or Sampson. She settled on Sampson. She told me she knew how the David story goes, and I liked that her takeaway was that David had a really cool slingshot that could kill people.

The Sampson story, if you’re not familiar with it, loosely goes like this: Sampson is really strong. He has long hair that is his strength. He falls in love with a woman who tricks him. He teases her for a while, then tells her that his strength is in his hair. She tattles on him, and her friends cut off his hair. They take him away and make him do hard work. But little by little Sampson’s hair grows back. One day he pushes over the columns in the building and the roof falls down. Everybody dies, including Sampson.

This may have been the first time that Kaileigh grasped that Sampson died too. She had to work on that one for a while. At first she asked how that could happen, because tents don’t have roofs that could hurt somebody. Then she thought the pole fell down and hit Sampson in the head. Then I told her the roof was made of big rocks, and that made more sense. But it was really sad that everybody died.

I wondered if she’d ask why that happened, what the point was, what the theological significance of Sampson’s hair or strength was. I’m glad she didn’t.

But I’m happy that she, like me, has to wrestle with Biblical stories that aren’t all happy and joy. I hope I can help her with her questions as she’s wrestling.

It’ll be interesting to see what story she picks tonight at bedtime.