The other night you asked your mom how we know that God exists. You wondered if maybe someone made up all the stories. How can you at six ask such questions? You are growing up much too quickly!
Probably the most fascinating story of them all is the one about the peasant family that gave birth to a baby boy in a dusty cave. Yet we are told this was the birth of God...at least as a human. What do you make of this one? It seems like it could have been made up but there are some details about the story we can be certain happened. This Jesus was born. How could that have been made up? There were shepherds and Magi and priests and plenty of others who saw the baby. He was born in a stable and that couldn't have been concocted out of air because there was an inn keeper who knew about it. The birth registry of the Romans would have documented his birth and anyone wanting to prove he never was could easily have looked that up. Of course the question about Joseph being the father is a bit of an oddity in the story but there is no reason to make that part of the account up. It would look too bad for the family of God to have the child not have the father who should have been his father his. How do you explain that to normal religious people anyway that you want to be your friends except that it is what happened. Make up the story that God was the baby's real father and you become a nutcase in a small town with enough gossip already in it to fill a stable. Either Joseph was the father (which obviously was not the case) or someone else was (which would have been the most reasonable conclusion except they never say it--because to their complete humiliation there wasn't another father). The story is a bizarre myth (which nothing about it except the virgin birth sounds like one)or it is what it is. God born the only way He could be born. To a mother normal like you and me but with God as His real Father.
The angels in the sky seem a bit weird too and that is understandable that you think it sounds like something from The Lion King. But again, it was real, filthy, dirt poor shepherds who saw it all and the story was never refuted...and could easily have been proven because the shepherds were there. No one questions a car wreck if seven people saw it. The fact that we haven't had many angel sightings lately doesn't prove they haven't occurred any more than a lack of George Washington sightings make the George Washington legend unbelievable too.
Now I realize that I haven't proven God exists but the other stories about Jesus are just as reasonable. The death of Jesus was witnessed by Romans, Jews, friends and enemies and no one refuted His death when the stories started circulating.
Oh, but the big story, the one of Jesus climbing out of His tomb after he died is certainly up for disbelief. But can we really question it just because we don't have dead grandfathers popping out of their coffins or dead aunts slipping back to us after they have been cremated. Just because I haven't seen such a thing can't always disprove it's something true. Again, I did not follow the Apollo rocket up to the moon and although it hadn't happened before, I am not one to doubt that shocking turn of events didn't happen. I believe the hundreds of NASA workers who tracked the thing and followed its progress through the skies. More than five hundred people saw Jesus alive after He died and they couldn't have all been a bunch of quackers with duck brains. There believability packed the Temple grounds of Jerusalem with normal souls like me and you who were too convinced to shy away from the most hated and purged "myth" to come along. No one made a movement of killing off Aphrodite lovers or Isis lovers. Those myths were just silly little tales. But the one of Jesus coming back to life was right there for all to see and prove right or wrong. And more than that, the myth cost you everything you had if you held to it too tightly...including little girls like you. You had to be certain you were right. Your world depended upon it.
The stories of God are a strange collection it is true my child but strange doesn't mean false. How do you explain a rag-tag band of one million slaves marching away from the greatest and most imposing army of its time if not by means of the sea splitting apart and the first borns of the slave owning nation all dying at once. The legend was too big for myth-hood. It was the most easily of all little stories to refute but the entire nation of Israel held to it not because it made them something special (psychotically special is what I really mean)but because every last grandfather of them and grandmother too (who are certainly more believable)said it happened. To top it off, the Egyptians all knew it happened and never made mincemeat (I know you have never heard of mincemeat--it is an ancient myth of still more ancient peoples than your own)of the crazy reports...because it happened just like Michael Jackson happened.
Myths that are really myths are just foolish but the myths that are true are only too good to believe. But then, I could say the same of you. Too good to be true!
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