In February 2018 I packed up my library and moved from one church to another. The church I left had a spacious office. The church had bookshelves in the office. I had bookshelves I put in the office. A deacon donated some shelves he had been using in his home office that he no longer needed.
I had plenty of space for my library. And the library grew and flourished over the years I was there.
At the new church, I was an associate pastor. My office was in a space where renovations had started but weren't finished. No shelves. My library stayed in boxes along the walls of the office.
When I left there a couple of years later (budget-related down-sizing), I moved my boxed-up library to a corner of a storage facility that a friend let me borrow. Deana and I lived in small apartments for five years so we didn't have space to unpack my library.
But we moved into a house in January 2023 and I now have space. But no bookshelves. I found exactly what I wanted from IKEA. But had to wait to get them.
One of the things Deana and I did when we found the house and realized we would need some things to make the house more homey was to make a list. We had 20 or more things on the list. Things from a bed to a chair to lamps to rugs to patio furniture to a grill. And bookshelves.
Then we prioritized the list and set out paycheck by paycheck working our way down the list.
The last thing on the list was bookshelves. Not because of the price but because of the necessity. My library had lived in boxes for five years. They had forgotten what daylight looks like. They shuddered at the thought of freedom, like Red and Brooks in Shawshank. They were used to the spiders. Honestly, they were probably just as touched and used in a box as they would have been on a shelf.
You understand, don't you? We have things we treasure but don't use or can't stand to part with. I have books that remind me of people. Some that remind me of places. Others that remind me of principles. Just seeing the title showing on the spine of the book sitting on the shelf takes me places I might not otherwise go. Even a stack of twenty-five boxes - boxes that are starting to crumple from being on the bottom of the stack, boxes that have a number written on the side so I can have an idea of what's inside them based on how I packed them - stacked against the wall in the garage (behind other stuff that's been stacked in front of them over the sixteen months since I unloaded them from the bed of my pickup) can take me there.
I'm a bit OCD and have a memory that will sometimes kick in and run like a cinema. I remember Riley and I packing up the library six years ago. We started from the left-most bookshelf, worked top to bottom. Shelf after shelf. Around the corner. Numbering the boxes as we filled them. Putting them in the truck, taking them from the church office to the garage of the parsonage. Later we'd pack them up and take them to the new church. Then pack them up and move them from storage unit to storage unit until finally (lastly) stacking them along the wall of the garage in the house where we now live.
And Saturday IKEA delivered the bookshelves. We had worked our way down the wish-list as we could and had energy and desire. Deana and I began the task of assembling the shelves. The last one was much easier than the first one. Now they are in place exactly as we envisioned when we moved in. It is very satisfying.
But the shelves are empty. Not yet "book"-shelves, just shelves. That will change soon. We've started looking through the boxes, one by one. Unfortunately, tragically, the boxes are no longer in numerical order having been shuffled and reshuffled with each move. Please allow me pause to shudder. Thank you, I can go on now.
I have more books than shelf space. That's not a mistake; it's by design. Most of my pastoral library is duplicated on my Logos software. While I'm old-school enough to prefer listening to a baseball game on the radio rather than watching on TV, I do like my e-books. Between Logos and Kindle, I have quite the e-library.
So I'm culling. I felt all you bibliophiles shudder when I said that. But I'm culling. I'm OK giving away the books I don't keep. I'm also good loading them one more time in the pickup and taking them to the dump. If you think you may want the books or just can't stand the idea of them being cast away, let me know and we can arrange for you to come by and pick them up. They'll be in the crumpled boxes along the wall in the garage.
So I'm culling and that means I have to make decisions. Have I ever read the book? Do I remember why I have the book? Might the book ever be useful to me? Is this a book I want visible on my bookshelf?
Shortly after we were married, Deana and I bought a house. We had an open house soon afterward and a guest stood at my bookshelves for a lengthy time then turned and said, "You can tell a lot about a person by the books in their library."
So I'm culling and making decisions. So far we have opened about a third of the boxes and kept about half of the books. I can't put them on the shelves yet because, like I said, I'm a bit OCD and the books have to go on the shelves a certain way. So I'll have to know what all is going on the shelves so I can put them in the right groupings and order.
This morning I got out of bed before 7:00, made a cup of coffee, and headed to the back porch with a book in my hand. Not my iPad, but a book. A physical book.
Any guesses what the book is that I picked to read first? After six years without my library, I chose "Lord of What's Left" by Vance Havner.
What a delight. Maybe today will be the day that my library is set free from the boxes to live again in the daylight on beautiful bookshelves. As I walk through the house in the early morning hours I expect to hear the books singing the old gospel song "He set me free! He set me free!" Up to now I've been hearing, "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen," by Potsie Weber.
