We didn’t have a lot in terms of earthly riches, the stock market didn’t know we existed. My parents were never on a black-tie event guest list. Tiffany’s was unknown to us. But one thing was certain, there were books. Lots of books. My mother loved doing her own reading. But, in addition, she insisted that any gifts purchased for us as children be books (her requests were often ignored). We had our share of toys and other things, but always at the top of the list was – books. And she read them to us when all we could do was point to the pictures. So insistent was she in this, that I could read simple books on my own before I went to school (I remember my first-grade teacher, Miss Horsman, calling me precocious. I had no idea what it meant but I loved the sound of that big, three-syllable word!). It never occurred to me at the time what a lifelong treasure my mother passed on to us four Freeman siblings.
The majority of my reading in those first years was limited to little children’s stories, always with pretty endings, something like ‘and they lived happily ever after.’ Gradually, the scope expanded to other types, bigger themes, some serious, some just for fun. A genre I discovered a bit later is historical fiction. I was hooked! Once, several years into my school days, I brought home a library book that my mother noticed, picked up, and read cover to cover. Then she forbade me from reading it and told me to take it back to the library. She said she’d been having nightmares for weeks from this book by author, Bram Stoker.
We’re in a season filled with story, filled with wonder, filled with mystery, filled with drama. It’s a love story and a story of intrigue and lies and desperate details. Most of all, it’s a true story. It’s a story that’s regularly been called, ‘The Greatest Story ever Told.’ It’s a story that includes us, is meant for us. It’s a story to read, to cherish, to celebrate, to believe, because it is the story of God becoming man to buy us out of slavery to sin, to tear down the wall of hostility that kept us apart, to adopt us as His own, to bring us home to be with Him! Ahh! The best story Mum ever read to me! PD
