Words from WW Blog

WORDS FROM W.W.                                                 December 28, 2015

                                   

Retirement for a pastor means a lot of things…some good and some bad. One of the bad things is that I have to move everything out of my office at church and bring it home.

That’s where the problem starts!

My personal library is in excess of a thousand books. The bookshelves in my study at home were packed out…before I brought books from the office! Now the floor of my study is featuring towers. It looks like multiple games of “Book Jenga” are being played! How high can I build the tower, and now can I take out that copy of Church Dogmatics; Volume 1.1 located two-thirds of the way down the tower without toppling the whole thing? Challenges and problem-solving!

My wife Carol’s frequently asked question is not “Is this all you’ve got?” Flip to the opposite side of that question and you would be accurate.

“You aren’t going to keep all these books are you?”

“Ahhh…no,” I  say weakly and without conviction.

I feel like a pastor whose cat has just had a litter of kittens, and now I must find good homes for Pannenberg, Barth, and Kung. The problem is that there are very few people who are interested in Latourette’s two-volume A History of Christianity. It resembles a Saint Bernard in size and effort. I have even less potential homes for Torbet’s A History of The Baptists. there are an abundance of people who wonder about Baptists, but very few who are interested in them.

I accomplished a little bit of clearance Saturday night when I removed four books from one of the towers…and snuck them to the basement…just in case I need one of them.

The mindset of a book addict is like that. I may not have even dusted a book for three decades and yet I still think we might use it next week. That’s how my brain works.

So now my home study is being considered for an episode of Extreme Hoarders. As I stand by in obvious mental and emotional anguish Rudolf Bultmann’s Jesus Christ and Mythology is carted out. Leonard Sweet’s books are in the process of being carefully removed when I scream “Can’t you leave me at least one?”

Pathetic!

I am, however, getting better. I moved all of my Chicken Soup… books out last week. They are hiding behind the stack of jigsaw puzzle boxes in the basement…just in case I might need them!

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This entry was posted on December 28, 2015 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Bible, Christianity, Humor, Jesus, love, Pastor, Story, The Church, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Baptist history, Baptists, Barth, books, Bultmann, church history, Dannenberg. Church Dogmatics, history, Hoarders, hoarding, Kung, library, Pastor's library

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