I like big books and I cannot lie.

I just saw a pinterest tip on what to do when "books are cluttering up your home". Can you imagine the dilemma of building bookshelves to actually house books and not things you have to dust from places like Home Goods, TJ MAXX, Marshalls, Target, etc.? We have an abundance of books here at our home and are NOT ashamed of it. Leaders are READERS! In fact, both of our nightstands are technically bookshelves FULL of books (and Star Wars things, of course)!
And I'm actually thinking of instituting a screen free zone in the room because books are healthier to fall asleep reading than anything on social media. When I charged my phone overnight outside the bedroom the first week we switched to Samsung phones, I felt a freedom and desire to explore the books on my shelves. And the freedom to NOT answer every single DING notification on my phone because it's typically my teenagers and their latest " so and so isn't talking to me" drama. #firstworldproblems

But books are magnificent creations. My office has two bookshelves full of Youth Books that help me become who I am in leading theses crazies. Ideas and thoughts and suggestions (and no, they haven't replaced the BIBLE in the ultimate category on HOW to train up a youth as a disciple). But each book has some little nugget of information that CAN and does make me a better person that my youth sometimes need.
The Marine has all sorts of fascinating non-fiction books from boat building, bee-keeping, mead making, and re-loading to biographies to Z Nation. He reads a lot as well and we keep conversations interesting that way. He can tell me how to build a boat, make a bee hive, and which honey produces the best mead as well as what happens when you don't shoot a Zombie in the head. I guess these topics could all come in handy some day, right?

And so, let my house, my office, my bedroom, my kitchen overflow with books. Someday we will have a library and they'll all be housed together, but for now, they're sorted by topic and room.  Kitchen has cookbooks, The Marine's bedside has his educational books, my bedside has chic lit, Christian books, a Bible, and a notebook, and the office houses all the rest of the Christian books.  I need to catch up on my reading, actually. After reading Create vs Copy, I haven't read much else other than the Bible. I have a great leadership book that is awaiting my assessment score before I can move on in the book, but that has paralyzed me from reading it for over two weeks now. Have you ever done that before? Get so into a great book, and BAM, they ask YOU questions and ugh, I don't always have the brain power to want to acknowledge those questions during a bedtime read or a relaxing afternoon so the book just sits there waiting and finally, you give up reading it till you have more time to mentally process the book?! I've been reading one book for over two years now because it's challenged my personal theology so very much. I've been wrestling with God over some of the topics in the book and came to realize it wasn't God's theology I might have been taught all those years ago, but AMERICANIZED Christianity.
 Did God really say... The same question that Eve had to wrestle with before eating the dumb fruit.

And yet, there's no concrete answer for my struggled thoughts. And some things aren't discussed because certain denominations teach that it isn't that way, when in reality, God hasn't said...
( and no, this is NOT relating to Homosexuality...) He hasn't said specifically but the ACTIONS in the Bible where Jesus was walking here on Earth CLEARLY state a different story....

Go and Tell ALL the Nations...

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