Same Book. Same Words. Different Woman.

The first story from The Bookshelf

Over the past several months, I have been asked more than once what I have been reading during this season of loss, grief, healing, faith, and beginning again.

It is a fair question.

Books have always been part of my life, and over the past few years there have been several that have found their way onto my desk, beside my Bible, into my morning reading, and sometimes back into my hands after decades of sitting quietly on a shelf.

So I had an idea.

I would create a page on my website called The Bookshelf.

Simple enough.

I began gathering the books.

C. S. Lewis.

Emmet Fox.

Lysa TerKeurst.

Gaylon Ferguson.

Books about prayer.

Grief.

Forgiveness.

Courage.

Faith.

I thought I would photograph the covers, write a few sentences about each one, arrange them neatly on a page, and share them with anyone who might be interested.

But as I began pulling the books from my shelves, something happened.

I remembered their stories.

Not the stories inside the books.

The stories of how they came to me.

And suddenly, a list didn't feel like enough.

Because each of these books belongs to a particular season of my life.

Some found me when I was grieving.

Some during the early days of sobriety.

Some challenged my understanding of forgiveness.

Others deepened my relationship with prayer.

And a few have been quietly traveling with me for much longer than I realized.

So The Bookshelf is going to become something different.

From time to time, I am going to take one of these books down from the shelf and tell you its story.

Not a review.

Not necessarily a recommendation.

Simply where I was when the book found me, why it mattered, and what remained after I closed it.

And it seems only fitting that I begin with a book that has somehow been traveling with me for most of my adult life.

The Sermon on the Mount by Emmet Fox.

The First Time the Word Moved Me

I first read The Sermon on the Mount as required reading in one of my religious studies courses at Santa Clara University, the Jesuit university I attended in California.

At the time, it was simply another book on a college reading list.

Or so I thought.

I was taking a Bible as Literature class, and I remember the first time we read the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible.

I cried.

Not because I was sad.

Not because something terrible had happened.

I was simply overcome with emotion.

I had known God throughout my life. Faith wasn't foreign to me. Scripture wasn't something I was encountering for the first time.

But this felt different.

The words seemed to move beyond something I was studying and reach somewhere much deeper within me.

And I didn't understand why.

So I did what I have apparently been doing for most of my life when I don't understand something.

I asked.

I reached out to my professor and asked him why reading those words had moved me to tears.

He gave me a word.

Compunction.

He explained it to me as a deep stirring of the heart when we encounter spiritual truth.

I don't remember every word of that conversation.

But I remember that word.

And I remember the tears.

It was the first time in my life that I can remember not simply reading the Word...

but feeling it.

I loved Emmet Fox's book then.

And somehow, I kept it.

The Book That Waited

Years passed.

A lot of them.

Life unfolded in ways that a young college student could never possibly have imagined.

Marriage.

Motherhood.

Moves across the country.

Loss.

Grief.

Change.

And somewhere along the way, my copy of The Sermon on the Mount found its way into a box in my garage.

I didn't throw it away.

I didn't intentionally preserve it either.

It was simply there.

Waiting.

During the early days of my sobriety, someone mentioned Emmet Fox during an AA meeting.

I remember thinking,

I know that book.

And even after all those years, I knew I still had it.

So I went looking.

Somewhere among the boxes containing pieces of another life, I found my original copy.

The same book I had held in my hands as a college student.

I dusted it off.

And I began reading it again.

There was something deeply moving about that moment, although I don't think I fully understood it at the time.

The young woman who had first opened those pages could never have known the life ahead of her.

She couldn't have known the joy.

She couldn't have known the heartbreak.

She couldn't have known the mistakes she would make.

She couldn't have known the losses she would endure.

And she certainly couldn't have known that decades later, newly sober and beginning again, she would go searching through boxes in a garage for the very same book.

But there it was.

Waiting for her.

The Words Hadn't Changed

That book moved from the garage into my office.

It has remained there ever since.

And now, in this season of my life, I find myself reaching for it again.

What strikes me most is that the words haven't changed.

I have.

Perhaps that is one of the extraordinary things about returning to a book years later.

We think we're rereading the same thing.

We're not.

Because the person doing the reading is no longer the same person who first opened the cover.

I read those words now through the lens of sixty-five years of living.

Through sobriety.

Through grief.

Through healing.

Through loss.

Through forgiveness.

Through prayer.

Through a relationship with God that has become deeper, quieter, and more intimate than the young woman sitting in that college classroom could have understood.

And yet...

I think of her sometimes.

That young woman who unexpectedly cried when she encountered the Word and then went to her professor because she wanted to understand why.

Maybe she understood more than I give her credit for.

Maybe she didn't need to understand at all.

Maybe something had simply been planted.

A seed.

And perhaps some seeds take decades before we recognize what has been growing.

Still on the Shelf

There is something comforting to me about knowing that this book has survived so many versions of my life.

It didn't remain prominently displayed on a beautiful bookshelf.

For years, I wasn't even reading it.

It sat in a box.

In a garage.

Quietly waiting.

Until one day, in an AA meeting, someone said its name.

And I remembered.

I find that beautiful.

Because perhaps that's how so much of faith has worked in my own life.

God was never absent.

There were simply seasons when I wasn't paying as much attention.

Then something would happen.

A word.

A person.

A prayer.

A book mentioned unexpectedly in a room.

And I would remember.

Oh yes.

I know this.

I've been here before.

Maybe that is why The Sermon on the Mount feels like the right place to begin The Bookshelf.

It reminds me that not everything we gather along the way is meant only for the season in which we first receive it.

Some things travel with us.

Some wait for us.

And some return when we're finally ready to hear them differently.

This book did all three.

Same book.

Same words.

Different woman.

And somehow, after all these years...

it is still teaching me.

Warmly,

Kathy
Art of The Crumb