You’ve probably seen them…videos of dominoes cascading through multiple rooms, over and under furniture, setting in motion all sorts of events that eventually arrive at a fantastic finale. The narrative story of the Bible is a bit like that. After Adam and Eve’s reach for control in the opening chapters of Genesis, God promises that one day their descendant will deal a death blow to the serpent who tempted them to sin. This is an initial domino in the story of redemption, and many more follow. Later God declares in Isaiah 46, “For I am God and there is no other; I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done… I will accomplish my purpose… I have spoken and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed and I will do it.”

“He told me the Bible!”

Our girls’ car was incredulous. “He what? How long did it take him?”

“About five minutes.”

That was it. The girls spent the rest of the way home, and our family spent the rest of the year, trying to figure out how to tell the story of the Bible to a five-year-old in five minutes. A disciple of Jesus for almost thirty years then, I felt distressed that I couldn’t do it. My biblical understanding was siloed. I could talk about Philippians and 1 Peter and parts of the Gospels, but then there were huge black holes in my understanding of how we got from the Exodus to Galilee. Was it one linear narrative? How could it be made simple enough for a child, or for me? Working together, and with a five-year-old conveniently in residence as a ready test case, we worked at it. The surprise was how deeply life-giving the process turned out to be.