I’ve been in a real read­ing slump. I think it’s, in part, due to lazi­ness, and, in part, due to a lack of mar­ket­ing expo­sure. Hav­ing been used to liv­ing in a more pop­u­lous por­tion of the state, I took for grant­ed that at the bi-week­ly cof­fee out­ings to Barnes and Noble, I was freely fed a ver­i­ta­ble buf­fet of new lit­er­a­ture. Not that it was all good, mind you, but there were always trea­sures to be found in the clas­sics depart­ment. Since my move to the north of nowhere, my buf­fet has been reduced to the spo­radic library book sale. Until now.

My imme­di­ate com­mu­ni­ty of lit­er­ary influ­ence may have dimin­ished, but the church is uni­ver­sal, praise God, and the long-dis­tance com­pa­ny I keep are a revolv­ing door of resource. These are not the books that I would have cho­sen just a few short years ago, but as we grow and change, we have new, and prayer­ful­ly, greater desires, and our book pile reflects it.

I now have a stack of the­ol­o­gy books in the liv­ing room, beck­on­ing me to stop being a wimp and fin­ish them already, and one on the way that I am par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ed about. I think my slump is final­ly over, and some­where in the back of my mind, I knew it couldn’t last long. A read­er can nev­er stray too far from the shelf.