I've often said that if you can get a youngster to read...even comic books...he can't help but learn things. Like in "Superman," he'll learn without realizing it, that "metropolis" means "a big city."

But get them to READ. The world is at their fingertips, if they'll read. My Mom took me to the library with her (we couldn't afford to buy books), and I read not only "Tom Sawyer," and "Huckleberry Finn," but also "Gulliver's Travels," to lands where in one place all were giants, and in another, where HE was the giant. I read scary stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and his love poem of Annabel Lee...I read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories and fancied that I could also know things by deduction (that habit still slips into me). And I can still quote from "The Highwayman" of a love found and lost.

And as a paperboy, I read the daily columns of a man named Eldon Roark, and followed him, day by day, as he drove to Alaska when the first road was finished from the U.S. And during World War Two, as a paperboy on the airbase near our home, I followed all battle lines with pins that I used to keep up with the advancing troops.

And I kept up daily with war correspondent Ernie Pyle life as he lived in the foxholes with the troops, and I still have the books he wrote about it. And I was hurt mentally when he was killed by a Japanese sniper's bullet on Ie Shima, a small island near Iwo Jima in the South Pacific, just weeks before the war ended. He had lived to see Germany surrender and came home, but then went to the South Pacific where time caught up with him in April, 1945. I have a letter from a former soldier who was there, and knew Ernie.

And I've said all this just to hopefully influence you to read, and of all things important, to read the Bible. Read that if you read nothing else, because it's your pathway to the Afterlife, where there'll be no more wars or anything else that's not good. Of all your aims and priorities, make the Christian Life the very first. Get help in choosing the Bible you read, and be sure it follows the meanings of the King James Version. As I've warned at other times, check to see that it calls Mary, the Mother of Jesus, a "virgin," not words like "young woman." Pray for guidance.