BOOKSTORES DEPRESS/ELATE ME!

At first I feel inspired! I walk in, smell the coffee, and feel significant. Knowledge everywhere, to make me more! And people's etchings and screeds, means (subconsciously) that they are, that I, therefore, am, and now can be more...
 
And then after a while, from gimmicks to gizmos, bonsai kits to self-destruct guides, coffee gone and sun going down... I feel kind of inane. Lost in a sea of more knowledge and people and vantage points than I could ever, ever assimilate. And if I can't know it all (be like god), how can I be at all?
 
So the one tree that we could not eat of, was the 'tree of knowledge...' (Genesis 3:5-6) We were warned that this was the portal to death. The devil told us it was the portal to 'be like god.' We ate, eyes were opened, life destroyed. Now every man, woman and child is marked by death, from the day we celebrate their life. And here is the neglected reality of the 'sting of death' (1 Cor 15): it is not just in the body, but in the spirit, the mind, relationships, the earth (Romans 8), the animals, history and annals and legacies.
 
It is against this backdrop of the truth of the dark, that the truth of God's light means so much. It is against the backdrop of the crucifixion, and all that died with it, that the light of the resurrection is so bright, and all that lives in it.
 
Bookshops elate me because God made every man, woman and child unique (Gen 1:27; Psalm 139), and Jesus treated every man, woman and child as unique. And the truest essence of any individual - in book form or otherwise - is to tap the spirit of God's unity in himself, and with us, his offspring. Jesus himself challenged and stretched us by quoting scripture and saying, 'You are all sons of god...' (John 10:34; Psalm 82:6). But he stretched us about the nature of our own 'deity', so that we would be in no doubt about his. (John 10:36)