I learned to love reading through comic books Archie and Richie, Rich and Marvel (esp. Fantastic Four). But I was a DC fan, my favorites being The Justice League of America (Green Lantern was my hero) and The Legion of Super Heroes (go, Lightning Lad). From there I dove into science fiction and fantasy, spending my nights looking through my telescope, then coming to bed freezing cold and reading science fiction by flashlight under my covers, so Mom wouldn’t see the light on.

I vividly remember forty years ago looking through the kids fiction section in the local library, and discovering a book I checked out numbers of times over the next years: Stadium Beyond the Stars, by Milton Lesser. (It centered on a journey to the interplanetary Olympics.)

Not a great book by literary standards, but a wonderful book to me to this day. As C. S. Lewis said of George MacDonald’s Phantastes, “it baptized my imagination.”

It was a great joy to hunt down Stadium Beyond the Stars online a few years ago, to order and reread it and be taken back in time forty years and forward in time a few hundred years. When I see it on my shelf my heart is moved. I think of how God had his hand on my life long before I was in high school, when I read for the first time a book that really captivated me...the Bible. That Book came alive to me when I met the Author, who soon became my best friend. Can’t wait for all the adventures He has awaiting us, His children, in the new universe.