A Review of The Sparkle Egg by Jill Hardie, Illustrated by Christine Kornacki

This is a sweet book and particularly helpful to a child who struggles with accepting forgiveness from God. The main character, Sam, struggles with ongoing shame and guilt despite confessing his lie to his parents and to God. As part of the family’s Easter egg activity, Sam decorates a beautiful plastic egg. With his mom’s encouragement, he draws a symbol of the lie he told and places this inside the egg. On Easter Sunday, the Sparkle egg is empty-it no longer holds the reminder of Sam’s sin inside. “Your egg is empty because the things you’ve done wrong are forgiven and gone-like the tomb was empty that first Easter day.”

I like the lesson of the empty egg and can see it as an excellent annual activity for children. I would, however, draw a tighter connection between Jesus in the tomb and the paper with Sam’s sin written on it and placed inside the egg. Jesus’ dead body carried all the sin of the world and was encapsulated in the tomb. On Easter morning, when the tomb was found empty and Jesus was alive, it proved that God accepted Jesus’ death or sacrifice for our sin. Our sin was gone and Jesus was no longer dead. The empty Easter egg is a small but tangible way for children to see that their sin is gone too because of what Jesus has done.

Second, very sensitive children may continue to have feelings of guilt and shame even though they have been forgiven. It might be helpful to remind them that Psalm 103:12-13 reads “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.” When God forgives our sin he no longer remembers it.

Published by Ideals Children’s Books, it can be found used on thriftbooks.com as well as new on other sites.