Series: Their Side of the Story
Published by B&H Publishing on June 2015
Genres: Children's, Bible Stories
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In this installment of the perspective-shifting series, Schmidt and Jones team up to tell the story of Lion who learns to trust that God will provide.
Trusting God can be hard. Just ask Lion. He’s never really thought about needing to have faith before, because he’s the King of the Jungle. God’s provided for him by putting him at the top of the food chain, but to Lion, that’s self-sufficiency. What Lion wants, Lion gets…until he gets thrown in a Lion’s den.
There’s no food in a Lion’s den and Lion is hungry. So are the other Kings of the Jungle trapped with him. When a man named Daniel gets thrown in, Lion is thinking that he’d make for a good dinner, but God has other plans. Daniel prays to God for safety and has faith that God will take care of him. God commands Lion not to eat Daniel and, in the end, both Lion and Daniel are taken care of by God.
Continuing their Have You Heard Their Side of the Story series, author Troy Schmidt and illustrator Cory Jones join forces for a fun and simple biblical narrative through the eyes of an animal that was there. This is probably my favorite in the series because it offers the starkest of contrasts. I would even wager a bet that the series was conceived from the story in this book.
Lion, the antagonist of the biblical narrative (to an extent), becomes the protagonist of our narrative here. Yet he ends up learning the same lesson we learn by watching Daniel’s life. God will take care of us. It’s a beautifully powerful storyline that’s especially poignant and helpful in directing young children toward the importance of building a personal prayer time to God.
Like the rest of the series, Jones’s illustrations are a colorful delight. Schmidt’s writing is complex enough that new readers will struggle to read it, yet simple enough that they’ll understand it. The reading level on the Flesch-Kincaid scale is between 2nd and 3rd grade, so keep that in mind if you planned on your young one reading it alone.
Overall, I heartily recommend The Lion and Daniel and the Their Side of the Story series as a whole.
Other Books in the Series