Library Day

If you have ever read Poppleton by Cynthia Rylant (and if you have any children between 3 and 5, you should read it to them, and if you don't have children, you probably have not and never will read it) you will know that "Poppleton went to the library every Monday. Monday was always Poppleton's library day." He's a pig who spends every Monday at the library reading an adventure story.

Such a life that would be, says this mother of three who spends her library visits keeping books on shelves and prompting to put the toys back in the toy box and helping with puzzles and approving (or not) books taken from shelves to go into the library bag for home. Today the three enthusiastic youngsters went to spend 9AM - 3PM at a friends' house, and the day is mine. Such luxury. I choose the library. As I walk to the door I'm a college student again, those college days of independence, when I went to the library to study, or in a rare hour, to read for pleasure, just me, surrounded by books and other book readers.

I'm reading Lighting Their Fires by Rafe Esquith, which references, in relation to teaching our kids appreciation of time, the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder. I find it on the shelf and begin to read. Interrupted at the end of Act 2 for lunch with My Hero, I check the book out and take it home with me to finish. I end streaming tears and longing to drink up every beautiful minute of this one wild and precious life I have been given.

EMILY:
In a loud voice to the stage manager.
I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have
time to look at one another.
She breaks down sobbing.
The lights dim on the left half of the stage. MRS. WEBB
disappears.
I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never
noticed. Take me back--up the hill--to my grave. But first:
Wait! One more look.
Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners...Mama and
Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food
and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking
up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
She looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly, through her
tears:
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every
minute?

STAGE MANAGER:
No.
Pause.
The saints and poets, maybe--they do some.

It's the life He's called us to. To be saints. To live in this extraordinary world and make the most of this gift of life, and worship Him for it and through it, because it all counts in the end.