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Something for a Friday Evening

I've realized a tendency of mine in writing: I hoard.

My earliest memories of that need to write are found in fuzzy pictures of a 14-year-old girl, scribbling poems borne of family sadness. Writing began with and was fed by hurt. Steadily throughout high school I produced hundreds of poems, yet two months after I started dating Dave the flow of poetry ran almost completely dry and has never returned. Life had gotten better.

What I mean when I say I hoard is exactly how webster defines it (also, you know you're a nerd when you have Webster.com on your favorite links). Tracing the word back down to its Old English and Gothic roots, it means"to hide treasure". And unhappiness has always compelled my pen more than happiness has; as it were I save the good memories, the treasures, for myself, reluctant to give them away to others in words. Maybe that's why I've been hesitant to post about the wedding or our honeymoon adventures in any detail...

But this is something beautiful I share. A very good gift out of an extraordinarily dense history of gift receiving.

Mama came over today, bringing a gallon of milk from the grocery that Dave and I badly needed and the promise of a present. I opened my apartment door at her soft knock, and with the gallon in her right hand and her left hand clamped strangely across her jacket, she came in for a moment. She looked at me with such excitement and said, "I read your blog - and I get it." Grinning, she pulled out of the folds of her coat (what else?) 3 books: Orthodoxy, Silence, and The Return of the Prodigal Son. I realized the selection immediately.

To explain: I'm presently reading a book by Phil Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church, and it is essentially 13 chapter-long biographies of extraordinary people and how they directly influenced Yancey's life. Dr. King, Chesterton, Nouwen, Dr. Brand...an amazing collection of people. And my mama "got it": the majority of these 13 were writers that Yancey had read, and in the reading these authors had shaped his life and his writing. Those three books came from among these thirteen people. That's what those 3 books meant - passing on life-shaping books with the great hope that they would help to shape my own.

You should've seen how her brown eyes glowed when she presented them to me, happily increasing my sizeable hoard of good things; a hoard I hope to more successfully unearth and employ in the future.

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