Explorers for God (Family Read-aloud Collection) - Hardcover

Aaseng, Nathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0806636084 ISBN 13: 9780806636085

Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Pub, 1998

Synopsis

Presents the stories of fifteen men and women whose faith led them to places around the globe, including Cyril and Methodius, Francis Xavier, Jeanne Mance, James Marquette, William Penn, Caroline Herschel, and Jane Franklin.

About this title

About the Author

Nathan Aaseng has written more than 100 children's books, including Augsburg's Grubstake Adventures series. Aaseng lives with his family in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

About the Illustrator: Doug Oudekerk illustrated Augsburg's Early Saints of God. His artwork has appeared in national magazines as well as several children's books. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his wife and two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"How often I wished I could companion my children through their most difficult experiences---or through their every joy. Too often I learned of the twists of their personal journeys after the fact. I hadn't been there. Moreover, if I had been, I may have been denied full access to---a full understanding of---their hearts and minds in the event.

"But there is a way, a blessed way into the hearts and minds of our children as they journey through life. When the parent reads out loud to the child, the older one becomes the younger one's most intimate companion. They travel together through dangers and delights, through adventures and mysteries, through stories, through genuine experiences---through life itself.

"The power of a story well told is to create whole experiences for the child, but controlled experiences with beginnings and middles, and with good endings.

"The reward for parents who read such stories to their children is an intimacy that is emotional, spiritual, and real. The walls come down; nothing is hidden between them.

"And the benefits to children are legion:

--They are assured that, whatever the experience, they are not alone.

--They are fearless before the circumstances of the story, however, frightening or thrilling. And, in consequence, they are prepared to meet similar circumstances in their real life with the boldness and trust that come of experience.

--They, when they laugh heartily, are empowered! For the laughter of children in the face of giants or troubles or evils is their sense of superiority. Their ability to see silliness in danger is their freedom to take spiritual steps above the danger.

--And they are granted a genuine independence, a freedom of choice. For children can choose to hear a fantasy tale as fantasy only, something fun and funny, but not anything you would meet in the real world. And they can listen to stories of distant heroes and heroic deeds as ancient history and nothing to do with their life. Or else they can choose to identify completely with the main character---in which case this fantasy or this ancient story stands for things absolutely real in their own world. Children don't make such choices consciously; they make them in the deep parts of their souls, when they are ready to take the real ride of the story. And the fact that they can and do choose grants them true personhood.

"And you, their parent, are there, companioning your child through wonders and terrors, through friendships and wisdom, through experience into experience.

"When my father bought a thick book containing all the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and read them to us, he did me a kindness more profound than mere entertainment. He began to weave a world that genuinely acknowledged all the monsters in mine, as well as all the ridiculous situations and silly asides that I as a child found significant. Dad/Andersen was my whispering, laughing, wise companion when I most needed companionship.

"Night after night my dad would read a story in his articulate, baritone voice. Gently the voice invited me. Slowly I accepted the invitation and delivered myself to a wonderful world. And as I looked around, I discovered that this world was confident with solutions, and I was a citizen of some authority and reputation. I was no longer alone, no longer helpless.

"Dad would sit in a chair beside my bed, one lamp low at this shoulder, his pipe clamped between his teeth and sending the smell of his presence and his affections to me where I lay. Mostly the room, an attic with slanted ceilings, was in darkness. The wind whistled in the eaves.

'Ready?' Dad would day.

"We would nod. We would curl tight beneath the covers.

'Once upon a time,' Dad would read, sending me straight through the attic walls into the night, onto the wind, for gorgeous, breathtaking flights.

"What part of my being could not fin affirmation in such an event? My body was present, delighting in his vicarious adventures. All my senses were alert and active, sight and sound and smell and touch. My emotions were given every opportunity---highs so tremendously high, and lows acceptable because Dad was the leader. My mind, my intellect, labored at solutions before the story itself declared them.

"And all my affections were granted lovely objects. I could love in that event when my father read to us: I could love characters in the tale; I could love their qualities, their deeds, their struggles; I cold love the tale itself---but mostly, I could love my father, whose very voice was his offering of love to me. We were one in this event, one in the reading and in the listening and in the experiencing.

"Night after night my father read to us from that thick book. Night after night I lived the adventures that gave order to my turbulent child's experience. The tales gave shape to my waking self, to my instincts, to my faith in God, and to my adulthood yet to come. For I am what I am now, in part, because once I experienced important events within the protected sphere of my father's dear influence.

"These events were deep and primal.

"But on the page they were merely stories---until my father opened his mouth and read them to me." ---Walter Wangerin Jr. from the Foreword "Worlds to Share"

Edition details

• Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Pub
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0806636084
• ISBN 13: 9780806636085
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Oudekerk Douglas
• Number of pages: 119