By Denise Crane

I’ve always struggled with the Noah and the Ark story. It doesn’t fit tidily into the loving and redeeming trajectory of God’s story with Man. Yes, I get that, at the end, there is a rainbow, and God sends Noah and his sons and their wives to go out and repopulate humankind while animals go out to do what they instinctively know how to do and that plants grow again.

But really? Creation was good. The plants and animals didn’t do any evil things (that we know of) Maybe giant Venus flytraps were eating more than their share of flying things in Noah’s time? Maybe alligators ate too many other things? That’s the thing about ancient stories: maybe there is a bunch of stuff that isn’t in the biblical narrative as it was passed down. Maybe all the death and dying was included in the story to be sure and remind us to watch out in case we misbehave or we will all be wiped out. Maybe everyone was polluting the earth so badly that climate change was causing too much water to accumulate.

Just like every other story in scripture, we get to make a choice about it. How do we struggle, how do we wrestle, how do we find the way God uses circumstances to move us in the direction of living in unity?

What if we had a choice to get on the Ark or not. Maybe only Noah and his family got on because they were the only ones who chose to. Maybe a bunch more people were invited but didn’t want to be bothered to interrupt their perfectly good lives.

I had a student like that once.

You may remember that I used to teach four and five year old Sunday School. We called it Wee Worship, and I got to be the storyteller every week. All the Sunday School classes met in their individual rooms, did a gathering activity, then came to the storytelling room with their teachers. I never actually counted the kids since it was often pretty chaotic, but I would estimate there were about fifty or so kids when it was time to get started. I tried my best each week to tell the story in such a way that the children knew they were loved, learned about the parts of the bible, and got to interact in some way with the story. So on the Noah’s Ark day, I had two different color comforters on the floor. I also had every available stuffed animal from the children’s wing of the church so each child had some way to participate in the story. I had all the children sit on and around one comforter, chose Noah and his family, and the other children chose stuffed animals.

I didn’t have enough stuffed birds apparently. One girl really, really, really wanted a stuffed bird. She’d been late to settle on the comforter and while there was still a cool giraffe left and maybe another animal or two, there were no more birds. I spent a few moments trying to give options that were acceptable to her, without success. There were forty-nine other kids beginning to squirm, so I moved on.

We all began to make our way from the comforter they were on to the comforter that represented the Ark (some couldn’t technically be in the Ark because the comforter wasn’t big enough, but four and five year olds know a lot about storytelling grace, so we made do). We almost got everyone safely on board, so all our animals were ready for the rain to come as were Noah and his family.

As you might suspect, there was a holdout. The girl without a bird refused to enter the Ark.

Her regular teacher urged her to get on the Ark. At this point, I have to explain to the children that everyone who isn’t on the Ark is going to get caught in the flood and drown. And, with as resolved a face as I have ever seen on a five year old, the little girl announced that she would just die.

If you don’t get the bird you want, how do you choose to move forward?