How do we view ourselves and how does that match up to reality? That’s actually kind of a tricky question, and one which is delicately handled in Sonia and the Biggest Block Tower Ever by Kathryn Butler and illustrated by Samara Hardy.
In this short story, Sonia wants to stand out from the other kids. In order to do so, she begins to build a block tower and quickly lets her imagination build it up to the heavens. (I kept expecting it to go the Tower of Babel direction, but this is a kid’s book after all…) When she is brought back to reality, she sees that her tower is just a small tower of blocks after all. Her teacher assures her (spoiler alert) that she is special anyway, because all of us are special in God’s eyes.
That point is of course true–and the main point of the book. But I think the smaller point is also a good one here: we build ourselves up into cosmos-spanning empires, when the reality is that we are very small and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. That doesn’t mean we don’t matter–the God of creation gave His life for us on the cross. Of course we matter. But we don’t matter as much or in the way we think we do. And sometimes it takes our tower falling down for us to see it.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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