Kindness & Gratitude
In this column, I'll continue a mini-series on values in children's books. This time, I'll focus on kindness and gratitude. Of course, kindness is one outworking of love, which is a key commandment, and gratitude is often a response.
Stories of Kindness
Here are a few of the many books featuring kindness. Time for Horatio, by Penelope Colville Paine, is set in England. A small, scared kitten is picked up by a boy who, with his father, takes tourists on trips down the Thames. During a stop at Greenwich, the boy and kitten tour the Royal Observatory and learn about mean time. On the way back, the boy has a dream that the kitten has climbed to the top of Big Ben to stop the bells, because he doesn't want there to be "mean time." Instead, there should be "kind time." The boy then reflects on all that "kind time" would signify in the world. Lovely.
In James Herriot's Smudge, the Little Lost Lamb, set in the English countryside, a young lamb crawls under a fence and gets lost, then is covered by a late snow. A kind and observant girl finds him and brings him back from near-death with a hair dryer and milk, and then finds his owner.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Kathie Johnson has always had a love for children's books. She collected many as a teacher and began sharing them with other teachers. In 1986, she opened a children's library in her home, and it has continued to expand over the years. Many home-schooled and schooled children borrow books from it, and she takes great pleasure in finding the "right" book for a child. She attends First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
30.6—Nov/Dec 2017
on C. S. Lewis, Brideshead Revisited & the Middle Things by Ben Reinhard
24.1—January/February 2011
Marriage Thrives in Reality, Not in Our Dreams by Nathan Schlueter
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
