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Note: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my weekly newsletter.
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Here's a thought, a quote, and a resource I wanted to share with you this Thursday.
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Ten years ago, I packed up my library and put it into storage. This week I have the privilege of finally unpacking it and giving it a new home.
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I feel like I’ve been reunited with old friends.
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Some books have kept or increased in value. They’ll be read for decades, even hundreds of years. They’re classics, not bestsellers. I’m overjoyed to be reunited with them.
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But many books haven’t aged well. Some of them are good books, but the authors have since experienced a moral failure. Others were never good books. They were bestsellers at the time, and I bought them because they were marketed well.
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My predecessor’s library haunted me. When he left this church, he left the ministry and forsook his library. Every single book remained in the office on the shelves, undisturbed; he took not one. My library was shelved in my other office in the other church, so his books stayed in place, like Little Boy Blue’s toy soldiers obediently waiting for their master.
His library told the story of his ministry. The books were ordered in topical fashion, but instead of “Pastoral Counseling” and “Commentaries” his topics represented most of the trends of Christianity in the 1970s, the decade of his pastoral ministry…
I knew every movement represented in his library. I’d tried them all myself. I didn’t know if I could do pastoral ministry without them. But every time I looked up at his library, I knew that I had to try.
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Looking back, I wish I’d learned the discipline of reading the weighty books of lasting value and ignoring more new releases. I can’t change the past, but I’m going to try and apply this lesson when I’m tempted by the latest new books.
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“To be able to turn at will, in a book of your own, to those passages which count for you, is to have your wealth at instant command.”
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