Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, November 16, 2024
This past August, in a small tourist-oriented town Shelley and I visited, we checked out a used-book store. Just inside the front door, I spotted this wonderfully-titled shelf, with the unabashedly mixed-message sign.
I mean, the first half touches my heart, because I too feel a pang when I think of all the written-and-forgotten books I see in stores like this. My hope for these shabby volumes would be that their potential readers would buy them (at $3 a book) to take them home and read them.
However, let’s get real. Most of these books look as though they are between 80 and 100 years old, and the reason they’re huddling shoulder-to-shoulder in a used-book store is that people who had no further use for them brought them here.
But the second half of the sign was written by a clear-eyed marketer. The bottom line is to move these tomes out, at three bucks a throw, to make room for other books. Not for reader edification, but for “home décor, staging, and upcycling.” What they meant by upcycling I had no clue, until I Googled the definition. Oxford Languages says it’s to “reuse (discarded objects or material) in such a way as to create a product of higher quality or value than the original.” In other words, bringing home and shelving scads of these books would create the illusion that their owner is a book-lover, and therefore presumably very smart.
Once upon a time — in another used-book store – I saw a Bible which was the perfect example of that. Its leather-like cover was worn, faded in the exact spots where a human hand would grip it. I almost bought it, purely because it seemed to have been lovingly read by a true devotee.
However, as I flipped through its gold-edged pages, I discovered that many were stuck together, even in sections you’d think a Christian would study, or at least refer to during a sermon, places like the Gospels, the 23rd Psalm, the writings of Paul. Obviously, this Bible’s owner had indeed gripped this Bible in hand during many a pious saunter across the church foyer and into the sanctuary, but had barely opened it.
You know where I’m going with this parable, right? God’s 66 Bible books aren’t for external display, but for internal deployment. Are you reading yours?
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