It seems I can’t read to my kids without seeing the love of God poured out on the page. Some portion of the blame lies in the purposeful selecting of works by Christian authors. More remains the purpose of God alone.

Today, for instance, we never saw it coming.

Excitedly, our imaginations darted towards eternity as we read of the sadness that helped to drive Hans Christian Andersen to the words he’d pen in tales the world would both cherish and warp to better fit their desires. Heartache seeped from life to fiction as he wrote from the depths of his pain.

As we read a short listing of Andersen works and discussed the themes of outward adornment not being equal to the beauty within us, we couldn’t help but muse at the possibility that Hans was in fact, Christian as his name.

Without digging further into the notion, we started our ocean floor adventure with The Little Mermaid. A story frozen in my fourth grade mind, lost as the innocence of that time, still cherished without any real understanding of what it all meant. I couldn’t wait to return to remembering as we sat down to read the story as it was written after seeing the more popular distortion of the real thing.

The imagery and juxtaposition of it all just invites one to dream a while, and so we did, stopping once and again to acknowledge the absurdity of one teacher’s would-be dream crushing ridicule. Surely God had allowed hardship in order to yield fruit so sweet as these words were to my very soul as I read them aloud:

“So I shall die,” said the little mermaid, “and as the foam of the sea I shall be driven about never again to hear the music of the waves, or to see the pretty flowers nor the red sun. Is there anything I can do to win an immortal soul?”

“No,” said the old woman, “unless a man were to love you so much that you were more to him than his father or mother; and if all his thoughts and all his love were fixed upon you, and the priest placed his right hand in yours, and he promised to be true to you here and hereafter, then his soul would glide into your body and you would obtain a share in the future happiness of mankind…”

Surely God has only allowed hardship into the life of a little child, of any one of His children, to yield fruit so sweet as Salvation, that we might win an immortal soul by the gifting of His Right Hand.