Passing my faith along… to my daughter

My two and a half year old daughter loves stories.

Stories matter. They give us meaning, significance and (re)shape our behaviour. I enjoy reading stories to her. Sometimes, I sit alongside her and watch her get lost in the cBBC stories. My daughter’s world is filled with cartoons and cartoon characters. She mouths their language, mimics their actions and she gets inspired by Barney, Timmy, Mickey Mouse, Justin and Giglebix. Stories like Beauty and the beast, Lion King and Jungle book have already captured her imagination.

While it is important for her to grow up with these stories, it is equally important for her to grow up with faith stories – stories about men and women of God who inspire faith and instill faith in our hearts. How do I make faith stories interesting and appealing to her? I am beginning to see the difficulty of speaking about faith as her mind gets crowded with cultural products. I have been telling bible stories but I do sense the need to (re)tell the stories within her cultural context of cartoons and attractive programming.

The other day, I recorded Bible cartoon stories and played them to her. She absolutely loved it. Now, Jesus stories have become part of her favourite list. She even comes to me once in a while and asks me to play Jesus stories. I now run a youtube channel specially for her and play kid songs, clips and other things regularly. I sense the need to create more media content for children. We need to produce comic books, computer games and creative material and make faith stories attractive and relevant to kids. We need to re-tell the gospel attractively, intelligibly and responsibly. I am begining to recognize the need to find new ways to speak faith and more importantly in the language that she best understands. And what better way than to speak in cartoons, comics and DIY style content. I have always wanted to do comic books. It seemed a distant dream.

Thank God for the internet. Technology now makes it possible to create comic strips/books online. Now, we can make comic strips with a few clicks. So I decided to make comics to tell her stories, particularly faith stories. Here’s my first comic strip for my daughter. I love the sun.

This is my first attempt and she like it (not a suprise…for she absolutely adores whatever I do).

Hopefully, I will be able to do better ones and with better content. It is not enough for just a few to dabble with technology to make ’stuff”. We need to make cultural products that will capture the minds and hearts of our kids. We do need to pray that God may raise animators, illustrators, novelists, children’s story writers, gaming professionals who will help pass the faith along to our Screen-agers.