My last Sunday to preach is December 27th. Maybe not the LAST last, as I believe that I will always be called to serve God's people, and after at least a six months sabbatical ("no preaching, no teaching, no leadership, but yes I'll do a funeral") someday I'll get back up on that horse. But my time as the preaching minister for our church is coming to an end, and the church is already making plans to move on without me.
So I've started looking around my office to figure out what to take. 21 years of books, sermons, memories, plus whatever I brought here from the 10 years before that. Since I'm not moving to another office somewhere, most anything I take will probably have to fit in the basement or maybe one of the kids' rooms. Having had a few months to think about it, though, I think most of it's not going to the house. I've already taken three boxes of books to our local library for their booksale (mostly books about sports, humor, and history); probably 90% of the rest of a lifetime's library will stay here. I need to call some preacher friends to come and have a look through, because what preacher can keep from getting more books? I know that for most of my career I couldn't. Whatever doesn't get taken will stay on the shelves for whoever ends up replacing me.
On this rainy morning I spent some time going through some boxes that have sat mostly untouched. In them were my old class notes from two stints in grad school, plus some journals that were part of my postgraduate academic phase when I thought it necessary to try and keep reading what was new and trendy in ministry or Biblical studies. The journals ended up being taken upstairs into our church library where they will likely sit for another 25 years, but I agonized a little bit more about my old classroom notes. Surely I could use these again? Or some wide-eyed student preacher might appreciate my insights and term papers from John Mark Hicks' class on hermeneutics? In the end, I was ruthless, and took two big boxes out to the dumpster.
I've still got a long ways to go. Pictures of the wife and kids, a Ron Swanson bobblehead still in its packaging, a cricket ball from my trip to Sydney before I was married...those will all go home to the Me Museum. But much of the rest of this? Soon to be gone or abandoned.
It's always easy at this point to hear again the words of our Lord from the Sermon on the Mount: 'Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal...' Yet I wonder, if Jesus had come in our day and age, would he have had a library? Pictures and cartoons on his wall? A first draft of the SOTM laying on the corner of his desk? And before he was crucified, would he have brought the Twelve into his office and start giving stuff away?
Perhaps all this kind of stuff is what makes us so stagnant as we get older. When we're young, we can toss everything into the back seat of a car and just go. But decades later, we struggle to let go to anything. Maybe cutting ties with so much stuff will be a blessing for me, and get me back to remembering what's important again.
In the meantime, anybody want some books???
