that took guts

My oldest, Dylan, is in a challenge reading class this year.  The kid can read well above his grade level, and he often chooses a pretty broad range of both fiction and non-fiction.  Recently, his reading class had a project called, "The Wax Museum", for which they had to read a biography and "perform" as a talking wax figure of the person they studied.

Sometimes your kids really make you proud.

This was one of those sometimes.

Dylan originally chose Mark Hall, lead singer of the Christian music group, Casting Crowns.  Great choice... except there isn't a lot of biographical content written on Mark Hall.  One evening, he was telling me about his choice to do Mark Hall because it would be a way to bring God to his public school, and that he was bummed that it didn't work out.  (Did I mention that I was proud of his choice?)  He wasn't sure who he would choose, since this first choice didn't work.  I told him I had a half-dozen, or so, biographies of Christians on my bookshelf that he was welcome to use, if any of them interested him. 

He hadn't really heard of any of them (Umm... Billy Graham?), but he thumbed through my books, and Jim Elliot, missionary to the Auca Indians of Ecuador, caught his attention.  Dylan read about the life of Jim Elliot, and was quite impressed... and was happy that pictures showed him mostly in a t-shirt, so it wouldn't be too hard to get in character!

He chose his "frozen pose" as standing while reading an open Bible.  When someone hit the "button" on his display, he tucked the Bible under his arm and told about his (Jim Elliot's) life.  When he was done with his memorized monologue, he went back to his reading pose.

He and I took a walk one evening, after the project was done, and he started telling me about what he learned from the life of Jim Elliot... which is pretty heavy stuff.  You see, Jim Elliot was killed in Ecuador at age 29.  I could tell the project had really impacted Dylan.  He also told me that some kids made fun of him for having a Bible at school... but, "it was worth it."

Whose kid is this?  I don't think I had that much guts at age 11... hmmm, do I now, for that matter?