Sitting in a Seattle public library today.  In my humble opinion libraries are a little slice of heaven.  The free public library is perhaps the greatest invention known to man.  If cynics argue with me about the depravity of mankind, hurling atomic bombs and gas chambers in my face, I counter with the public library and those super-stealth rolling bookcarts.

Guarded quiet.  Shuffling pages.  Wooden desks.  Comfortable reading chairs.  Vertical towers of carefully filed glorious books.  Ahhhh…

You can't know the balming affect of libraries unless a.) you've grown up in them like I have, and/or b.) you've been deprived of them for an extended time because you are a prison-of-war, an expatriate living in a foreign country, or a castaway stranded on a deserted island.

China was hard for this reason.  As good as the Internet is, it just can't compete with the physical sanctuary of the library.  It's the atmosphere and the tactile functions.  The (focused) sight and the (muffled) sound.  And to add to ALL that goodness of proximity, with libraries you also GET TO search for books, reserve books, check out books, take home books, jump on the Internet, get CDs, DVDs, and many other forms of media.  Wow…if there's any good reason to want to pay taxes, it's this.

Being here though, in a place so comfortable and familiar to me, I can't help but think of the library out in rural Qinghai where we worked this past year.  The doors have been closed more than six months now.  It's sad. Regulations (and our country has them, too) often trickle down and ruin a good thing.  What's sad to me is how the local community got to taste what libraries can be like only to have that morsel snapped away with no promise of return.  Christa and I weren't there when the patrons were told that the library wouldn't re-open for a while (for forever?) and I'm kind of glad we missed out on that sadness.  But our friends were there though and I'm sure that was very difficult news to pass along. 

As I sit in my own local libary typing, I am still hopeful that that town in Qinghai will get its library back some day.  Maybe my family will get to be part of that GRAND re-opening.  Or maybe in the future the library will be passed along to some local folks who can run with it.  It's worth a quiet prayer or two. 

A word of advice:  appreciate your own book repository this weekend.  If you have one, you're blessed.  Maybe more than you know.  So don't take it for granted.  (Oops.  Sorry for being preachy…)