Reading and Thinking

Beloved:
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          An empty chair is first of all a chair . . . is one of the dozens of ways G. K. Chesterton speaks of God.  And, the absence of God comes to us as the presence of the absence of God . . . .

          As I turn it over in my mind, I remember a college minister shaking his head and saying, “Annette, you read too much.”   Had he been the only minister I knew, I might have been broken-hearted but, instead, I just kept reading.

          Thirty-six years later I’ve come upon a new heartbreak.  Even if my eyes hold out, I won’t live long enough to get through all I have left to read.  I already barely do housework.  I suppose I could hire a reader to do double time as I knit and sew.  But then who will take notes?  Can I afford a reader and a scribe?  Posing yet another question and then another after that:  Is it possible I read too much?  That I might better spend my time?  Or that I take too much pride in reading . . . or in these notebooks full of scribbles that no one on God’s green earth, including me most likely, will ever remotely care to read?

          Surely that’s just crazy thinking, for which the same college minister expressed concern:  “Annette, you just think too much.”  Maybe he’s right on both counts, after all.  In any case, I’ll take my chances that he’s not, so long as my eyes hold out.  And then I’ll find a reader, some young bibliophile upon whom the same spell is cast.  They will read and I’ll drink tea, and we’ll talk books until my nap time comes around.  If such a thing is even possible, then I know for sure that life only gets more grand.  I pray you find some joy today!

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette

Books I have going these days:
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, Reinhold Niebuhr
The Hidden Life of Trees,  Ben Wohlleben
Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, Juli Berwald