The curse of the blessed books...

My desk is wall to wall with books I have bought these last couple years as Dean of the seminary.  They are great books!  The books our students are reading are wonderful, and the ones we can only summarize are tremendous too.

What a curse for me!  I'm sitting here looking at some incredible stuff (just today I ordered the new Bonhoeffer biography by Metaxas and Yoder's Politics of Jesus, which I've never read but should have years ago).

I close with a poem by Walt Whitman, first introduced to me by my good friend Bill Patrick.  It's not particularly Christian, but I feel this way sometimes...
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Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest of me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.