Sunday Snippet: Tales of Truth – A GiveAway…

Here is a fun series of books, new to us, that we have really enjoyed. They are picture books, and each page is beautifully illustrated. The writing just slightly harder than an easy reader, but easier than a chapter book. They made fabulous books to read to our younger children and the middle ones enjoyed reading them for themselves. The stories are about great christian heroes and we are all for books that provide our children with heroes relating to their christian heritage.

The story of Mary Jones in an unforgettable one. A young girl, growing up in Wales and poor as can be. She dreams of going to school and learning to read. The arrival of a village teacher means that this dream is achieved… but like most dreams one dream leads to another. Because she can read she is allowed to read from the village bible and she begins to dream of owning her own bible. The price of a bible is far beyond her means and her parents encourage her to save… she does odd jobs for people in the village and works hard to achieve her goal. After six years of saving her precious coins she finally has enough money to purchase a bible… and this leads to the next challenge. Mary Jones did not live in a time when you could just visit the nearest book store. Turns out she has to walk 25 miles on her own to the next village… and when the now teenage, Mary arrives at the door of the local church to buy a bible, the minister does not have one readily available. Upon hearing here tale and the years of perseverance that went into her journey, he manages to find a bible for her, in her mother tongue – Welsh. The minister is so caught up by her story that he carries it to London where he shares it, in an effort to get more bibles made – available to the folk in Wales… this sparks the idea of bible translation and so one little girls dream sparked an idea that would bring so many people the world over, a bible in their own language.

You can read an interesting printable of her story on the Bible Society Webpage, as well as a look at a map of her journey, which I love – filled with photographs and tips to help you achieve the two to three day hike, talk about stepping back in time.

So many stories have been written about David Livingston, and to be honest I didn’t think our kids would go for yet another retelling. But I was wrong, my middle boys loved this book – they read it with enthusiasm and kept dashing to tell me more, before they read on. It may be the way that the book begins that caught their attention: He was the second son of seven children… they lived in one room with no electricity or heating… My kids relate to that well, they have stayed in one room homes and they understand being one of many. They were really inspired about the effort he put in to studying – David Livingstone didn’t give up, or uses circumstances as an excuse. He wanted to learn and he studied after work, late into the evening he attended night-school, only to get up before dawn the next day to work in the spinning mill. And as for the adventure, the traveling into Africa as a young family, being put to the test of courage time and time again… well this really peaked their interest and on they read.

We have a copy of each of these books to GiveAway to a lucky reader. This GiveAway works in the usual way, leave a comment before the end of 3 March, 2014 and we will draw and publish the winners after that. I won’t respond to your comments as I do on our other posts because I don’t want to be included in our own giveaway.

Our GiveAways are open to everyone: If you have won a GiveAway before never fear – enter away. If you live on the far side of the world – enter away. Postage takes forever from here but eventually it should get to you! Good luck and happy commenting!!!

As usual we have to thank Christian Book Discounters, who supply Sunday Snippet GiveAway books for us to review and GiveAway. We are not paid to write our reviews and the opinions expressed are entirely our own.