Can You Receive His Blessings?

I’ve always wanted a library, a room filled with built-in bookshelves rather than freestanding bookcases–a room intended for books. If I ever got one, I knew, it would be a luxury. After all, who really needs a room devoted to housing books? For that matter, who needs enough books to fill a whole room? It was a pipe dream, I believed–the kind of dream that will never come true because it’s simply not necessary.

Then, a few weekends ago, my husband and his dad turned my home office into a library with a full wall of built-in bookshelves. Forty-two standard shelves. One thousand, two hundred-sixty inches of shelf space. They weren’t cheap, although they were made with as much economy as possible. I found out later that my husband, who had sold his dirt bike a few months prior and set aside the money from the sale as a cushion against the fact that we were purchasing our first house, used some of his dirt bike money to pay for my bookshelves.

I watched in awe as my husband and father-in-law installed the shelves, marveling at all the tiny pieces of trim added to create rounded edges, at the addition of molding to the tops, at the filling of nail holes and plugging of screw pockets with wooden plugs that then had to be sanded flat. There was so much mindful detail work; I’d had no idea. When the shelves were finished, they looked like they belonged in the room, like they might have always been there.

They’re a love gift, those shelves. A love gift to me.

Oddly, when the paint was dry and the time came to unpack the forty-some boxes of books they were meant to house, it was difficult to fill the shelves with the kind of joyful abandon I’d expected to feel. As I busied myself unloading thousands of books from their temporary cardboard homes, I realized I didn’t believe I deserved those beautiful shelves. For that matter, I realized I didn’t believe I deserved the book collection that would fill the shelves.

Join me over at The Glorious Table to continue reading.