Papers, Books and Friends

During the last couple of weeks I have been busy putting my basement back together after the flood.  I was determined to NOT return anything to the basement that I didn't want.  It has become a much greater project than I ever imagined, and since Christmas is nearing I'm rushing and not being able to finish it quite like I had in mind, but it is better than it was.  Of course, my goal is to finish it after Christmas, but then my goal has been to dejunk my basement the past several winters.  Hopefully this time it will work.
I had two large four drawer filing cabinets in the basement before and I was resigned to getting it down to one filing cabinet.  I spent days with papers spread all over my upstairs family room floor deciding what I would or would not keep.  It was so fun to find papers that have been lost for years and also exhilarating to throw stacks and stacks of papers away.  I am now the proud owner of just one filing cabinet!!
One of the papers I found had a quote by Dr. James Dobson on it.  It reminded of a time when we lived in Logan (almost 25 years ago) and a few of our couple friends went to a Baptist Church for parenting classes.  They showed us lectures by Dr. Dobson who was the founder of Focus On The Family.  He has since left the organization, but it was a wonderful resource on parenting in our younger years.    Dr. Dobson is a staunch Evangelical Christian with some incredible moral values and a desire to strengthen families.  Here is the quote I found.

"There is no greater threat to effective parenting than life in the fast lane, where busy mothers and fathers race from one obligation to another.  It takes time to introduce children to good books and fly kites and play punch ball and put together jigsaw puzzles.  It takes time to listen, once more, to the skinned-knee episode and talk about the bird with the broken wing.  

These are the building blocks of esteem, held together with the mortar of love."

Dr. James Dobson

I also am a collector of books.  I have literally hundreds of books and so many of them were on book shelves in my basement so they were all boxed up after the flood.  Last weekend Jeff was helping me put them back on the shelves.  He very kindly suggested that maybe I could part with a few of the books and we could send them to the DI.  I agreed thinking I could part with them as easy as had the papers in my filing cabinet.  We started pulling them from the boxes, and unfortunately as I would see each one I would very tenderly look at the book, remember a time or a thought or have some memory of each book and place it back on the shelf.  There were very few books that I could part with.  I finally decided that I had a personal relationship with each book.  They are like my friends.  I couldn't just discard them, I needed each one.  

I love my books and I love my friends.  I'm sure I will keep the old ones and hopefully add many new ones.