Imagine your life as a library. There's a section on early childhood that you may not remember yourself but you've been informed by family members' repetitious stories, grainy video footage, and a collection of underexposed photographs.
There's a short, wide shelf for the elementary years. These are the memories you probably first started integrating on your own. Stories of learning to make new friends, how you handled your first betrayal from a friend, and likely your stats from every category of your performance on the presidential fitness test.
Middle school. Oh, boy. This shelf might contain multiple volumes on a single emotion or experience. Chapters of perhaps your first romantic experiences beginning to take shape.The seeds of an identity separate from your immediate family growing into an independence that is all your own.
The rows and the aisles continue to expand through high school, college, young adulthood, middle age, and beyond. This library is detailed. It catalogues every experience, every feeling, every minute impression whether brief and fleeting or long-lasting and sustaining.
The books and pages exist in a range of conditions. Some are pristine, barely read, barely touched, barely acknowledged. Some have been completely ravaged, ripped, torn, hanging by just a thread. Some editions have extensive footnotes, references to encyclopedias and dictionaries tailored to your signature vocabulary and definitions based on your unique worldview. Some pages have handwritten notes, manually scribbled explanations, thoughts, wonders, anxieties. Some pages are dog-eared, bookmarked, highlighted, some are torn out completely.
You might be tempted to think that you, as the librarian over the Library of You, would be the expert on everything held inside. Why not? You lived all of these experiences, of course. Yet, the sheer volume alone of these items is what makes them impossible to understand by one, lone librarian. As familiar as any librarian is with the complete catalogue of their collection, could they ever recall any obscure resource without the assistance of some type of organizing system to reference?
In the Library of You, Jesus is our reference. He is the one who organizes the unorganizable. He is the one who brings meaning, order, and value into the millions of books, stories, and words on our shelves.
When I thought about this, my metaphorical library was a mess. Piles of books everywhere, mixed up and in disarray, tossed about carelessly. Many of the books are broken, pages torn, spines falling off, some are locked up completely with no key anywhere to be seen. Many have writing that is illegible, undecodable. Pages of my life that I have yet to reconcile or make sense of myself.
But when I invite Jesus into the Library of my Life, he starts cleaning things up. He lovingly picks up each book, cleans it, restores it like a master book binder, he refashions it into its original intent. He places the books on the shelves, in order, with his own special Dewey decimal system, assigning to it a permanent home.
He tells me, "We are going to give these purpose now. No longer are the events of your life going to feel random and unrelated. I will weave them together into value and identity. I will repair them and make them useful again. You will use them to serve others.
You'll use them to feel calm in every interaction. You'll use them to feel whole and complete in every circumstance. You'll be able to draw from these specific memories instead of feeling like they are only vague impressions of who you are."
I am surveying the damage all around me, doubtful of how any of this could be turned into what he promises, wondering how I had accumulated such a mess in the first place, and why I've let it sit here all this time.
He draws closer to me now, the importance of this message blossoming in my heart for really the first time. "I couldn't get to these before. You wouldn't give me access. You wouldn't allow the time that it takes to walk through these halls and restore these rooms. If we ever got close, you slammed the door shut again."
A painful realization dawns over me, there is a whole section of my library dedicated to references of ways and times I denied letting God work in my life. Books I've checked out over and over again as I protected and idolized something else over God's sovereignty in my life. See also: pride. See also: anger. See also: hurt. See also: resentment. See also: grief. See also: fear. See also: coping mechanisms. I cringe to relive these memories even briefly. Can't we just burn that section down?
With Jesus fully present in the discarded mess of my library of life, I can feel his staying power, his commitment to total restoration.
"I'm going to build this library again. I will do the rearranging. All you have to do is draw from the source of it. These all have meaning and are valuable, even the ugly and broken ones. They all belong here with me."
#thanksbetogod
This is beautiful! You’re so right. Many of the chapters feel out of sorts and unable to be reconciled… but God. ❤️
They all belong. ♥️