Repentance is hard. If you’re a Christian, you know what I’m talking about. You know the sense of shame and fear that comes when we realize that 1) we’ve sinned and 2) we need to tell the person against whom we’ve sinned. In the best of times it makes us want to go and hide, even as the Holy Spirit strikes our consciences and tells us that we need to get to it now. This internal war between the flesh that does not even want to admit blame, let alone confess it and repent of it and the Spirit that compels us towards repentance and restoration is a heavy topic for a children’s book, but Arlo and the Great Big Cover-Up by Betsy Childs Howard and Samara Hardy does a good job of handling it.
The plot is pretty straight-forward, because, you know, it’s a book for kids. Arlo is on his bed for “quiet rest time” when he notices a scratch on the wall above his bed that looks like a mouth. In a burst of artistic inspiration, Arlo gets off his bed (against the rules during rest time), gets a marker and draws the rest of the face on the wall–obviously also against the rules. He then realizes that his mother is going to see it and know what he did, and then he’s going to be in trouble. He isn’t able to erase it, so instead he tries to hide the face on the wall by stacking toys on his bed until it’s covered, and then hides under the bed and awaits the descent of his mother’s wrath. When his mother arrives, she calls out to him while he is in hiding.
Arlo eventually comes out from under the bed, confesses and repents, and is reconciled to his mother with the disciple of no screen time for the rest of the day or the next day. Which leads to the first problem with this book: I’m not sure how old Arlo is supposed to be, but he has far too much screen time if he’s getting it daily.
Aside from that (which is tongue-in-cheek, if that’s not clear), this book does a fine job of laying out an issue that children can understand, walking through the difficulties they (and we) will encounter in doing the right thing after we sin, and presenting a picture of grace in action. It’s a book that will make a fine enough addition to your child’s bookshelves.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In