Pack Up The Babies, Fill A Shoebox, and Visit The Lonely...

Halle, halleluja...

Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show hit the LifeWay store in Texarkana, TX on Sat. afternoon and the First Baptist Church of Nashville, AR on Sunday afternoon.  Yes, I knew the people in both places and yes, they were smaller venues, but I signed/sold around seventy-five books.  Those aren't Palin or Huckabee numbers, but you've got to start somewhere, right?

Speaking of numbers, I attended church Sunday morning with my parents.  This Baptist church prayed over 3000 Operation Christmas Child boxes.  A friend of mine once visited a family in Rwanda.  As he looked around, the walls in the home were bare save for one item held to the wall by some tape.  It was a My Little Pony doll, still in the plastic packaging, never opened.  The story goes that the little girl received that in an Operation Christmas Child box and it was the thing she cherished most.  Stories like that birthed from shoeboxes packed by the hands and fingers of unsung saints make book signing/selling/promoting feel like the kinda stuff Jesus turned the tables on outside the temple that day.

Monday held a drive to Dallas, TX for a television interview.  But before that came to pass, we stopped at a retirement center to visit my dad's uncle Sam Patterson.  He is known as S.C. - he and my dad's mom, Nora, are the last of their siblings still living.  S.C. drove a bus in downtown Dallas for thirty years; a treasure vault of stories.  He lost his wife, Vaughn, in September.  She was his best friend.  He now spends his days sitting in a wheelchair listening to country music and being a crank to the nursing staff.  The hair on his head has all gone white while the bruises on his arm were fresh blue; a fall days earlier left him "bunged up."  Patsy Cline had a hit song - The Last Word in Lonesome is Me...as I looked around that cafeteria, that's what I saw...a whole lotta lonesome.  It wasn't lost on me that one day you're young and alive and signing books and the next you're a widower wearing diapers wishing she was still around.

Halle, halleluja...