Books Becoming Real

I picked up a couple books at at Border's last week while I was on vacation. One was a book on grilling that I mailed off to my spoilee in the BBQ Swap on Ravelery. Two others had to do with church stuff. One I've been wanting to read entitled Un-Christian, which is a Barna study on how young adults perceive the church and the second was Shane Clairborne's Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, which I picked up on a whim.

Those books that I pick up on a whim are often the best books. I stared Clairborne's book and will probably be up most of the night finishing it. It's a easy read and pretty inspiring. It reminds me, so far of the intensity to do something with my faith that I felt when I was in college. That same intensity that Clairborne writes about had me volunteering at the homeless shelter at Our Savior's Lutheran Church in Minneapolis my senior year in college. That same intensity had me not worried about going into the rougher neighborhood to do my field ed my first year in Seminary.

Somewhere I lost some of that intensity and traded it for comfort and I'm not comfortable with that and hope that I get gain back that intensity again because the trappings of comfort really don't bring comfort and I've seen in my own life that God really does take care of what we need.

Well...that's not what I was going to blog about. I was going comment on how these two books have become real. They became real because as I was at my desk over at the church today, my coffee spilled on my desk and all over the two books and some papers (like a survey I need to return to Research Services...sorry Jack and Deborah) and these two books. Of course I could have got mad at myself and called myself stupid, etc...but I didn't. I realized that these two books wanted to be real (like the Velveteen Rabbit) and they too wanted to enjoy a cup of coffee.

Oh, they've been marked. I can't put them up on Book Trader or Paper Back Swap or Book Mooch or sell them on Amazon Marketplace when I'm done reading them and maybe that's the difference between 'just a book' and book that becomes real.