make something heavy

The light you possess shines through the quality and moral integrity of the work.

You are ensuring that the fundamental flavor of the story is good. Your Christian worldview—which believes in absolute truth, real morality, and ultimate hope—will naturally season the narrative's underlying themes of justice, sacrifice, forgiveness, and love.

The novel is a tangible, impressive achievement. Use the weight of the novel's process to validate the weight of your theological thoughts.

"Could it truly be important for children to have long, light, whimsical, colorful, imaginative, heart-wrenching books full of wonder, simply written by a Christian, even if the content is not overtly Christian?"

The novelist Flannery O'Connor, when speaking about Christian fiction, said that the artist's responsibility is "to the integrity of the art." If your story is beautifully written, morally honest, and true to the structure of goodness, it will inherently point toward the source of all Truth and Goodness.

B. The Absence of Dark Analogies

If Christians retreat entirely from this genre, the field is left open to other worldviews. When imagination is nourished exclusively by stories that embrace nihilism, despair, or moral relativism, those are the "analogies" that become "encoded" in the child's mind.

By providing a book that affirms goodness and... See more

It seems your feeling of making "light things" stems from the tension between your current, highly visible work (the novel) and your core identity (reformed theologian/Bible teacher).

The plumber isn’t doing Christian repairs to your pipes. The carpenter isn’t making Christian chairs. But they can do their work in a Christian way

In summary: You are not just writing a kids' book; you are building a framework of wonder, hope, and moral imagination in the soul of a child.