By Jean Matthew Hall at www.jeanmatthewhall.com

I am called to write books for children: board books, poems and articles for children’s magazines. I’m learning to write chapter books and I’m enjoying each new step of my writing journey.

I especially enjoy writing picture books because they are more than books. Picture books are poetry and art seamlessly blended to give us a memorable story. Picture books create an experience shared between children and the adults who read to them.

So, the authors who most inspire me as a writer also write for children. There are several, but I’m focusing today on the award winning author Katherine Paterson, the author of The Bridge to Terabithia and many other children’s books. She has a new Christmas picture book coming out with Flyaway Books soon. It’s titled The Night of His Birth.

Paterson is also the author of several books to inspire and inform those who write for children. Most are out of print, so you’ll really have to search for them. My favorite is Gates of Excellence: on Reading and Writing Books for Children.

Paterson reminds me why I write for children. She reminds me that this entire realm of creation was made by, and belongs to God. She reminds me that each person I write for is a special creation of God with His special purpose for their lives. She reminds me that my ability to write, and my gift of imagination are both undeserved gifts from God—gifts He wants me to use to glorify Him and minister to His little children.

If you need to be reminded of why you write for children, or read to children, or teach children look no further. Gates of Excellence will transport you back to that moment when, for the first time, you knew—you really KNEW—that you were meant to minister to children. You were meant to share God’s truth, or God’s love, or God’s acceptance or forgiveness through the stories of your imagination, or the information and lessons you draw from the complex beauty of God’s created world.

Here’s one wee bit of inspiration from pages 113-114:

…it occurs to me that I have spent a good part of my life trying to construct bridges. Usually my bridges have turned out looking much more like the bridge of Terabithia, a few planks over a nearly dry gully, than like that elegant span across the Narrows. There were so many chasms I saw that needed bridging—chasms of time and culture and disparate human nature—that I began sawing and hammering at the rough wood planks for my children and for any other children who might read what I had written.

But of course I could not make a bridge for them any more than I could conjure one up that night on Long Island. I discovered gradually and not without a little pain that you don’t put together a bridge for a child. You become one—you lay yourself across the chasm.

I once told a friend that, as a Christian, I cannot separate what I do from who I am. I’m reminded of that each time I write. Who I am bleeds into whatever I am writing.

As Christians who write we do not have to dot our manuscripts with churchy words, or Bible verses or references to Jesus for them to reveal the TRUTH to our readers. Our words will reveal the eternal TRUTH that lives within us—truths that we know about God, about the universe He created, about His love and forgiveness, about his power and beauty as it is reflected in His revelations of Himself in nature, in God’s Word, in Jesus’ earthly life, in our lives as His Holy Spirit lives and breathes through us.

When writing fiction for children we don’t have to tack on a Bible lesson or moral to point readers to the Author of all Truth. We just have to be faithful to absorb God’s truth from God’s Word into our own hearts, and then let that TRUTH reveal Himself through our words.

Jean Matthew Hall blogs Encouraging Words for parents, for writers and for picture book lovers on her blog at www.jeanmatthewhall.com. You can reach her on Face Book at Jean Matthew Hall, on Twitter at Jean_Hall, on Pinterest at JeanMatthew_Hall  and by email at jean@jeanmatthewhall.com.