I stood in Goodwill tonight once again amazed at the number of self-help books at the resale store. Books on weight loss and financial freedom, how to live well over 40, how to be your best you now, how to win friends, how to negotiate, how to choose a career, how to change career paths, how to train your dog… self help on everything imaginable. And interspersed among those shelves of books were a number of Christian self help books. No, they aren’t called that. Christian marketing is different. These weren’t “self help.” They were “inspirational.” How to read the Bible, how to get more out of Bible reading, how to pray, what to do when bad things happen, how to process grief, how to find a good church, how to become a better church, how to govern your thoughts, how to be yourself, how to be a better person, how to accept you as you… Books, and books, and books.
Anymore, I briefly scan them, cringe at a few titles and move on to the other books, but one particularly caught my eye. The book was written by a man who had been injured and was in a wheelchair, and it was about what to do or how to think when bad things happen. Nice thoughts, but the first thing I thought was, “There are no easy answers.” I walked around the store for a bit and worked through this. Because really, it’s more than that. There are no easy answers, true. But sometimes it’s not that there are no easy answers. It’s not even that there are no good answers. It’s that sometimes there ARE NO ANSWERS AT ALL. There are things I will NEVER have answers to.
And then I kept thinking about all those books. Books that seemed to give all the answers. There must be a reason they’re sitting on resale shelves collecting dust. I’m sure the solutions they hold must work for some people, but they obviously didn’t work for everyone. Otherwise they wouldn’t be selling for a quarter or a dollar at Goodwill. If they’d worked, either the reader would have kept them or given them to friends who needed the same answers. But those books on resale shelves tell another story too, of people who want answers, who hope they can obtain those answers for $12 or $25. Those books represent disappointments… disappointments in the books and disappointments in ourselves because the books didn’t work. Because, wow, if that author said it worked and others bought it, it must work But it didn’t. And there is a race to the bookstore for the next new idea, the next book, the next answer in 500 pages or less.
We haven’t failed if 5000 self help books haven’t helped us. There are no easy answers, and sometimes there are no answers at all, and sometimes the only thing that needs fixing is the fact that we are so sure we need fixed.
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