About once a month, I’ll stop in the little country church where my brother-in-law serves as a part-time minister in Abingdon.
I love how good-natured Steve tells a joke then wraps everything back into the Scriptures.
And, at the end, he’ll offer a message of hope – a positive thought to take into the world.
Still, he always tosses in some believe-it-or-not tale. Only this past week, he just didn’t have to. He was sick.
Instead, the believe-it-or-not tale came simply from the fact that my 12-year-old niece, Tiffany, Steve’s daughter, actually delivered a sermon written by her father!
Tiffany’s sermon left me inspired. She talked about funny inventions – but also people’s discarded dreams.
I carried that thought with me throughout that snowy Sunday as I browsed through the Bristol Herald Courier’s big book sale.
There, at the old Goody’s building in Bristol Virginia, I came across all kinds of crazy book titles.
Actually, I wondered how many of these were books that just never really caught on – and how many discarded dreams were left in the dust just to get some of these books in print.
By the time I left the sale, I had bought a bag of cookbooks, a Johnny Cash biography and “Abingdon’s,” a 1979 novel by Michael French.
Now, I don’t know anything about “Abingdon’s.” I don’t know how successful this book was or wasn’t.
But I grabbed it simply for the name.
This is not about our beloved Abingdon in Southwest Virginia. The dust jacket says, “Welcome to Abingdon’s – the most chic, the most outlandish, the most successful department store in New York.”
Still, it made a good souvenir for another girl – my daughter – the only Abingdon native in my immediate family.
Quickly, on Sunday night, my daughter grabbed that book from my hand.
She called it “my book” and started reading – until a passage turned out to be a little more adult than her first-grader mind needed to know.
Quickly, I grabbed it again.
For now, this mysterious book about big-city power struggles will simply sit ceremoniously high on a shelf. In the meantime, though, I will teach my daughter to never discard any dream.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement