New Year in the Library

Wednesday afternoon, after a few days of bathroom-painting and other housecleaning chores, our family took a break to bring some older winter coats and other gently used clothes to the Christian mission thrift store in Prairie Village, Blessings Abound. Luckily, we came home with fewer things than we walked in with!

Then, after stopping at Costco—and getting cheap pizza for the kids and $1.50 polish & soda combo for the dad—we realized Laura didn’t have her hat, and decided she should drive back to the thrift store to look for it. We killed two birds with one stone, though, by having her drop me and the boys off at the 95th Street Oak Park library branch, and the three of us spent the next half-hour looking for books, audiobooks, and, yes, a couple of juvenile DVD movies for the boys (Sadly, they weren’t interested in my suggestion of the clearly college-scholarship-producing video Life Lessons from Global Geography).

So when Laura came back for us, we filed out of the library with almost a dozen items—in 3-4 different formats. And on the way home, we even got treated to Eli reading to us from one of the books, which hasn’t often left his hands since.

As our GodSightings™ Read-through-the-Bible program begins today, I’ve been thanking God for the serendipity that His Spirit breathes into our lives when we walk trustingly into His word, open to whatever He has to show us. This book you and I call the Bible is really a library—a collection of very lovingly, prayerfully, and spirit-written books compiled by scores of writers over thousands of years, then recopied, transmitted and translated for hundreds and thousands more! Each book of Scripture has not only an earthly history, some of which we know better than others, but a decidedly divine origin, too. God used human writers to craft His Word to His world, and through them He put His very heart into it, too, telling us a lot about Himself and the kind of relationship with us He longs to have.

In the beginning God created heavens and the earth.

That’s the first verse in the first book in our portably library from God. And, wow, what a start! From that first Big Bang (or, as a Christian particle physicist I once knew called it, the Big Breath) on forward, God’s Word to us has been a marvelous gift—giving us the richest stories, the deepest insights, the most lasting truths, and the most meaningful invitation to life the world could ever imagine, Jesus Christ!

Don’t miss the chance this year to walk into God’s library—and plan to stay the whole year. You can even add to the shelves of the saints by journaling your own response to what you find there. The shelves open tomorrow!