I once heard Kay Arthur tell a story about how she sold all her
possessions before becoming a missionary when she was younger because she “read
in the Bible that ‘where your treasure is, there your heart is also’, and ‘I
didn’t want my heart to be stuck in a storage facility somewhere’”J… In person, her delivery was clearly humorous, but I can
definitely relate!
A few weeks ago, I decided that if I didn’t start going through my
belongings now to at least majorly minimize, I was going to
move to Papua New Guinea in a few months with boxes of things in my family
members’ homes that don’t need to be sitting there for years.
So in March, I began with the books! As I swiped at the dust and
pages with my fingers and lovingly inspected each one, I realized the books on
my colossal shelf go back through a habit of at least twenty years of
story-hoarding... In school, through my most awkward years, books
were my escape to incredible places and times, and characters that could
understand me more than the people I was meeting in middle school. Though I was
mostly a library borrower then, the habit stuck, and I found delight in large
vocabulary words and the characters that used them.
 |
College-Mon working
on my Senior Project |
By high
school, I was a full-fledged Lit-nerd who'd begun the habit of scouring used
book stores for the oldest copies of favorites I could find, and becoming an
English Major in college only multiplied the "problem" ten-fold! Each
semester would bring a new long list to acquire, read, absorb, and
analyze, and by the time I graduated, I'd plotted to buy a bookshelf to house "my
loves" so they didn't have to live in odd, studious floor-stacks
anymore.
When I moved out on my own after college for the first time, I
found a used, three-part, mammoth bookshelf that felt perfect and proud to hold
them, and when I became a teacher later, I found myself continuing the habit of
hitting up used book stores after particularly stressful or rewarding teaching
days to mark the momentous occasion J. Later,
the well-loved collection even required a fourth build-it-yourself, additional tall shelf!
So now, as I tried to undertake the minimization of this heap o'
books, I found myself quite a sentimental goose over them—over and over again,
I found little notes tucked away in the pages, and not the grocery-list kind,
but the memory-fiber, weighty kind. I rediscovered a meaningful letter from my
village roommate during my time in Ghana in '04, there were cards of encouragement
from friends at all different points in my life, and post-its my parents had
hidden away for me to find when I was in Italy. There was a lunch-note with
doodles my sister and I had passed back and forth over a few days in high
school, and some drawings we'd swiveled to make each other smile. Many of the
books were given to me as gifts, with heart-words poured out on the cover
pages. Some marked epochs in my personal growth, or instantly took me
back to seasons of struggle when I'd clung to those pages for comfort.
There was something beautifully
cathartic in this sifting process, and when I was finished I had a medium-sized
keep-stack, a pile of precious notes, bookmarks, and letters, and several boxes
of books to part with! It was fascinating to find that my whole life until this
point could be partially measured out in books, and it was also beautiful to
learn that these outward shells were not my treasure, but that there are so
many deeply lovely memories, lessons, people, and so much unwavering human
emotion that I connect to those titles and the words found within them. These things I carry with me, and several oceans won't change that.
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