Her first story

“In the beginning, there was nothing. Nothing to hear. Nothing to feel. Nothing to see.”

These words, part of the opening to Sally Lloyd-Jones’ Jesus Storybook Bible, took on a new dimension of meaning for me as I read them aloud to the baby in my womb this week. That afternoon my husband Jonathan and I had had our third sonogram. The sonographer, a kind, gray-haired man who apologized profusely for the coldness of the ultrasound gel, quietly announced—just as if we get this kind of news every day—that we were expecting a baby girl.

We celebrated by purchasing our first batch of girly baby clothes: Oshkosh overalls, a tiny purple sweater with a whale embroidered on it, and an itty-bitty dress with kittens marching down the front. Through the entire pregnancy, Jonathan and I have had the strange intuition that our baby is a girl. But the sonographer’s assessment, combined with the baby clothes, made us feel that reality had hit. We closed the momentous day by calling our girl by name and reading her first story ever—the one that knits together all the stories of the world, including hers: the story of Jesus.

So there Jonathan and I sat, talking to an unborn person about the unborn world. At first it almost felt silly. Kumquat (our nickname for her) has never seen the creation depicted in the book’s sensational illustrations. She can’t speak English, and she is just beginning to decipher the world’s sounds. But, I reminded myself, I must not underestimate the God who made baby John the Baptist leap in Elizabeth’s womb as a herald of the Messiah. Baby John had not seen the world. He didn’t speak a language. He did not know Jesus yet, exactly. But the Holy Spirit was already doing His work.

One of the book’s first illustrations shows preliminary drawings, presumably God’s plans for the world. A set of clouds hovers over a mountain, with a down-arrow indicating the fall of rain. An up-arrow rises from a stretch of sea waves, showing God’s plan for evaporation. We see Saturn, a model of the solar system, the rotating Earth, a fish, a long-billed bird, a snail, and an artist’s sketch of God’s most beloved creature, man. In the first pages, nothing of the universe exists except this beautiful plan. There is nothing to hear. Nothing to feel. Nothing to see. But, as Lloyd-Jones points out next, “God was there.”

God, the great architect and artist, goes on to fill up the nothingness with everything. “Hello stars! Hello sun! Hello moon!” He jubilates. “You’re good.”

To me, the book’s greatest beauties lie in its ability to link the cosmic to the personal and, as the title indicates, to teach us that every story is really about Jesus. “It takes the whole Bible to tell this Story,” it says. “And at the center of the Story, there is a baby. Every Story in the Bible whispers His name.”

Reading The Jesus Storybook Bible reminds me that by bringing our baby girl into the world we join God in His great, creative work. We fill up the nothing with everything. And it is very good.