Dino Dig

So my Mom told me the other day of an interesting conversation Saylah and she had. If you don’t know me super well, you should probably know, I’m incredibly passionate about my relationship with Christ. I began to get to know Him as an adult, maybe nearly 7 or 8 years ago so I also feel really blessed to get to share what I’m learning with my children.

That being said, I believe Saylah seems to have a special connection with God. I’ve always said, if Say says God told her something in her heart … well, He probably did. For Pete’s sake, the girl’s name means “to pause and reflect on God’s word” and I sincerely think she does.

So it was interesting when my Mom told me we had a little evolution vs. creation conversation going on in our home the other day. No biggie really, as Saylah doesn’t even know the two camps exist yet. She knows that not everyone knows God but she doesn’t of course know that there are wars over this conversation that she posed to my mom.

I guess after school, Saylah and grandma were hanging out and Saylah, who recently created a cool dinosaur village picture, must have had dinos on the brain. She inquired, “Grandma, if Adam and Eve came first. How did the dinosaurs exist?”

My mom, a little taken aback by the deep conversation ambush did a fabulous job answering Saylah’s questions. She explained yes Adam and Eve were the first PEOPLE, but God created all the animals of the earth before then, right? Say concurred and then asked, “Yeah, but how did the dinosaurs get buried if there were no people?” Which lead my mom to talk about sedimentation. She went as far as talking about, if something is on the beach and the wind blows, that object gets covered by the sand, right?

Saylah pondered for a bit and remarked, “What if the dinosaurs never existed and people just spread a bunch of big bones all around making it look like they did?”

Here’s what I find funny about this statement (beyond the obvious mental image of people running around spreading big dino-sized bones around the world):  MOST skeptics when challenged with God and evolution, choose the side of evolution. I’ve never heard anyone really say, maybe the dinosaurs were the fake out. I know there are arguments about that, but that seems silly to me since we can of course prove that dinos existed (regardless of how they were buried, right?) ;)

God tells us to have faith like a child and I think Saylah shows us here what He means by that. When questioned with what we can see and what we cannot, she erroneously thought she had to pick one or the other so she chose God.

She’ll of course learn that dinosaurs were, in fact, real. I can’t really answer scripturally why they aren’t mentioned in the Bible. But here’s the thing, at all points in our life I believe we encounter times when we question our faith. And I personally think that’s okay, it can help reaffirm what we believe and know.

I also think that all three of my kids will at some point question if what they believe is really what THEY believe. And I welcome that. Faith because I told you to is not faith. But I am glad that Saylah isn’t questioning it just yet. =)