Virginia Butler writes about her experience with Together for Hope, the Fellowship’s rural poverty initiative 

CBF field personnel Leonora Newell shared the dream at the 2003 CBF General Assembly. In Phillips and Lee Counties, Ark., designated among the twenty poorest counties in the United States, she had a vision of Stories on Wheels. Those who grew up in rural areas recognized a bookmobile.

I borrowed her dream when their work became my writing assignment for CBF children’s missions resources. Leonora discouraged my writing about it since the stories did not yet have any wheels. But the dream was strong and would not leave my mind. In 2004, I wrote about the stories that had no wheels.

In February 2005, in First Baptist Church in Huntsville, Alabama, a group of boys and their leader read about the stories that had no wheels and caught the dream. They shared the dream with their church. Soon everybody from kindergarteners to senior adults grabbed a piece of the dream and turned the bus they had been trying to sell into a thing of beauty and function.

The dream was shared at the 2006 CBF General Assembly where the newly outfitted bus stood on display. Not long after the assembly, church members took the bus to Helena, Arkansas. Churches and individuals who caught the vision sent new and gently used books to form a well stocked children’s library. Summer interns found satisfaction as they took the Stories on Wheels bus out to the housing projects in the community of Fairview.

This week brought a satisfying closure to the dream for me – or so I thought. I went to Helena as a volunteer and read stories to Kids for the Future. These three to five-year-olds, sitting on the two tiered seats at the back with smiling faces and twinkling eyes, joined me on a Bear Hunt.

But it was not closure. As we got back to the Community Center, another door was pushed ajar. One of the workers introduced her sister from Fairview. The sister said, “My son is in one of the summer pictures on your bulletin board! Now I know where that bus came from.” A former teacher and literacy volunteer, she said she had been asking everywhere trying to find out where the bus was.

In her next sentence, she asked if the bus could come to the community of Elaine. Soon she was caught up in conversation as Leonora explained that she needed to find a church wanting to sponsor Stories on Wheels with at least four adults willing to be trained. “We have two requirements for the use of the bus,” Leonora said. “You must tell about God’s love, and you must promote literacy.”

Where will the bus go and how many children will get to read books because of its presence? We don’t know. It seems the dream belongs to God, and God is taking it farther than any of us who have touched it could ever imagine.

Virginia Butler lives in Hattiesburg, Miss.