I'm not sure when I first discovered the library, but I know it must have been a happy day. My earliest memories off the library are from when I was about 8 years old in Kirkland, Washington at Benjamin Franklin Elementary School. They had a great library!

It wasn't like any other library, for they had a T.V. set right there near the front desk. I can remember the librarian having some cooking show or, even better, one of those new game shows on and it playing softly in the background while we kids browsed among the books. My love for reading was fanned into the flames in Kirkland. Maybe it was from earlier when my mom used to let me sit up in her lap while she read fairy tales from the big book. Maybe it was because it rained so much that we kids had to find some quiet activity, and reading had a way of taking little boys on adventures that were suppressed from their inability to go outside on such days. It probably had the same effect on little girls, but I only have a faint memory of them even existing when I was eight. 

What I think really got me going was a competition (for those of you who don't know, a competition was something we had to encourage best efforts and high ideals prior to the days of participation trophies) in one of my elementary school classes where the teacher came up with the idea of paper chains that hung from the ceiling to show each child's progress. Each link of the chain was a strip of brightly colored construction paper (I think mine was green!) and she would add a link for every book you read. I can remember having a goal of getting my chain which started at the ceiling to reach all the way to the floor. When it finally did, I then proceeded to double down on my reading to get it to reach back up to the ceiling.

When we moved just outside of Houston, Texas a few years later my love for the library just got that much stronger.

They had board games!

I can remember me and my best friend David Bales riding our bikes there and seeing what game we could check out and play - right there in the library! It was true that we had board games at home, but they paled in comparison to the absolute pleasure a twelve-year-old boy could get from playing a new game in the relative silence of the library.

I wonder if libraries have televisions and board games anymore?

Well, a few years have passed since those wonder years, and while I rarely go to the library anymore, I have done my best to produce one wherever I am. I have an office with no less than five bookshelves, and my wife and I must have another half dozen at home. While I don't venture much into the modern public library these days, I am pleased to see that my grandkids all seem to love them. Now they have computers you can just sit down and use, as well as videos you can check out and take home to play in your own DVD player or video games you can take home and play in whatever one plays video games in. Who knows, they might even still have books you can check out!

I think it was Benjamin Franklin who popularized the idea of public libraries in America, and men like Andrew Carnegie who donated millions of dollars to make sure that one was available in a town near you, and I am grateful to the foresight of these brilliant men. Even more, I am grateful to these wonderful library ladies who are there with a quick "shh" if you get a little too noisy, and who seem to have an uncanny knack for finding just the book you're looking for, even when you're not quite sure just what that book may be.

More than that, I am thankful to my own mother and my early grade schoolteachers for implanting within me a great love for reading. It has not only kept me from being bored on rainy days, but it has also had a sneaky way of educating me along the way, even when I didn't even know it was doing so.

I wonder if there will be libraries in Heaven. I suspect there will, because it will certainly contain the greatest book ever written, by the greatest Author there will ever be.