I Love Libraries

I don't have to preach tomorrow. I do have to preach next week. It's Matthew 22:15-22. The story where Jesus says, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." I decided that I needed to do some thorough exegesis for this one. For those of you who may not know, exegesis is like doing research on a specific Bible text. You tear it all apart and find out what every word means and meant. It involves lexicons, concordances, Bible dictionaries, commentaries, and maybe even, if you're lucky, a little Greek grammar! I don't happen to have a reference library with all those volumes (yet), so I went down to Biola. They were nice enough to give me the clergy rate on a library card and let me loose with the books.

I know libraries aren't fun houses for most people. However, I didn't have a deadline, I have a week until the sermon, the exegesis isn't graded, and I'm actually very interested in studying the Bible, so I was just soaking up the library. It was nice to be in a student atmosphere again. It was nice to have so many useful books in the same room with me. I just like libraries.

PS One of my biggest pet peeves in life is to go to the shelf in a library and find that the book I need is not there. Especially if it is a reference book or a reserved book. It happened to me today. I needed the third volume of the Anchor Bible Dictionary and it was gone. I din't see it laying anywhere and I didn't see anyone using it. I sure hope someone didn't just take it out of the reference area and leave it somewhere. That would be ridiculouse.