You Can't Fall Off the Floor

Can anything good come out of Winton? The King James Version of the Holy Bible relates an episode in which Jesus Christ was choosing men to become Disciples. Phillip was sent to invite Nathanael to join the other followers. When Phillip informed Nathanael that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah, Nathanael asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Nazareth, like Winton, was not a place in which one would expect to find greatness. The negative label that too often has been placed on small, rural towns and their people can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Unless an individual has a healthy view of self, he or she may live down to the level of popular perception.

I spent a fair amount of my youth living with the socially assigned designation of “country kid”. The inference of this distinction was that I lacked many of the virtues that were automatically attributed to “city kids”. That may have been true, but the net result was that it motivated me to prove that something good could come out of Winton. As Phillip did to Nathanael, in this book, we invite all to “come and see”.