Of Making Many Books there is no End Because Everybody Wants to be Famous

Cleaned out the books in Matt's office yesterday. Stacks and stacks of books that came there from I know not where. Piles of flowery looking Christian romance novels, puffy bound Devotionals, compilations of quotes by CS Lewis, self help books, how to have a better marriage in two easy step books, chicken soup for the American soul books. I didn't put any of them there. I think as we've cleaned and decluttered the church Matt's office has become the last best resting place for everything that didn't have a true home. Well, their true home will now be some nice charity shop.

The whole exercise has made me reconsider my life long dream of writing a book and getting it printed on real paper. I love a book with a nice binding and sensible words inside that go together with each other and don't make me feel as stupid as reading the internet. But the stack of those kind of books, left over, stood one foot high, compared to the seven boxes and three more stacks of books that are going away. If I were to be so foolish as to write a book, I know what would really happen to it. It would be small and plain to look and so would easily fall into the back of a book shelf, or have the pages rumpled and torn by babies, or be glanced at and thrown into the back seat of a car to be covered with many layers of salt and mud. That great pinnacle of one's life, Getting Published, doesn't seem (to me as an outsider) any more ultimately satisfying than anything else in life. It's glorious for a bit, but eventually you discover your own book shoved at the back of some dim second hand shop and realize that you aren't Shakespeare after all.

I'm just trying to work through, in my own mind, why someone as famous and and successful as Mark Driscoll would act with such desperation. Going first to someone else's conference to hawk his book, like a second rate author of whom nobody has ever heard. Then paying a lot of money to game the New York Times best seller list. Not to mention the accusations of plagiarism swirling round everywhere.

“?!?” I have said to myself. Why is he doing that? Hasn't he gained everything he could possibly desire in this life? Wealth. Success. The massive church every small time pastor everywhere looks at and thinks, If I just had that I would be Perfectly Happy. And yet there seems to be fear everywhere, along with grasping, laziness, anxiety, envy–I say, whispering softly, looking in from the outside.

Certainly the great desire for fame and acknowledgement presses so hard upon each and everyone of us with a cell phone and a wifi connection. We are each only one funny jumping cat or laughing baby away from instant viral youtube success. We can measure our worth in number of Facebook likes. We can open up email in the morning and immediately know how important or worthless we have been the day before. But the great thing is to not give in to this pressure. As Christians, however insecure and anxious we feel, the most necessary thing is not to live out this feeling, to act as though we really are finally measured by the number of books sold and amount of ensuing twitter chatter. Knowing that we live and swim in this ocean of fame and Being Known By Everyone in order to have Any Worth At All ought make us pray and live as though Anonymous Poverty were the highest and best goal. I'm not saying we should feel this way or even really truly believe it, but we should all pretend very hard and act like it is true.

In the meantime, I am both judging Mark Driscoll for behaving very badly in public, and judging myself for knowing that if I was that famous I might just as easily do the same thing, and praying for mercy that being Known by God would be enough. Like the Levites, upon discovering that their portion would be The Lord, and thinking 'Oh man, I really wanted a great swath of land and a big house' I will nevertheless go into the house of The Lord and say A Big Thank You for everything I have received from the merciful hand of my savior. After all, he said that I was his portion, and that certainly is the short end of the deal.