BELONGING TO TABLAB

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

I returned the Donald Westlake book about Dortmunder today. I didn’t really need it when I took it, but I so much wanted to take a book, because I wanted to belong.

It was the day I walked the other way. I had been walking the same 32 minute loop around our new neighborhood each day, admiring the homey houses and rosy roses, so I had not noticed it before. When I was walking the other direction, there it was. I had heard about them but never seen one.

On the corner of Allendale and another street that is not Allendale, there was a post, with a wooden box atop it, with a slanting roof and a glass front. It was quite nice but clearly not of commercial manufacture. It was decorated with painted vines and the words, Take a Book, Leave a Book.

Sure enough, when I peered in, there were two rows of books, paperbacks on top and hardcovers on the bottom. I did not need a book. We do not have room for even one more book. We have just moved into a condo and brought too much stuff to fit in at all. But it is such a wonderful and intriguing concept. I wanted a book. No, not that I wanted a book, but I wanted to take a book. I want to be part of the kind of group where we don’t even know one another but we leave books for one another. I want to be part of the TABLAB community.

We need that in old age. So many of the communities we’ve been part of automatically no longer have room or need for us. Or else we are without communities because we have moved to some place new, to be near the children, or to get away from them.

If you are old and without community, look around. You may find some group to belong to right there on the street corner. TABLAB fits me perfectly. I can belong to a community without ever going to a committee meeting. And whenever I need to get rid of a book…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I’m sure I started writing about TABLAB some place, but cannot find it now, so if I have already posted it, I apologize.

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.