Don't Panic

Many of us have go-to books on various topics. Maybe you have a book on preaching, or a resource on funerals that you have used so often that you don’t even have to look it up – you just know where it is. You stop by the library, go upstairs, get to the familiar aisle and find – nothing. The shelves are empty!

What has happened? Has there been some form of bibliographic plague? Did the roof leak? Did the staff succumb to some kind of mad impulse to discard thousands of books?

Fear not. We have not discarded thousands of your favorite books. There was no catastrophe. The books are safe; they are just in a different place in the library.

Ok, they may be a bit more crowded, and some of them might be a little harder to reach (sorry about that – and please feel free to ask one of us to fetch hard-to-reach books for you), but rest assured: we are not planning on getting rid of them, and we are not trying to make them harder to find. Rather, this is the first step toward the promised land of a shiny new library.

Of course, as you may have guessed, to get to the promised land, one must first spend some time in the wilderness. Moving the books is part of preparing for our desert (or racquetball) sojourn. We have cleared off some of the tallest shelves we have in the 1978 portion of the library (the part that is doomed to destruction) in order to use them in the racquetball court and thus maximize the number of books we are able to make available in the temporary, miniature library (the library in exile).

If there are any go-to books that you want to make sure we include in the library in exile, please let us know. And if, in the meantime, you have any trouble finding any books, please ask – we’ll be glad to help you find them.