Just one place is all I need. Somewhere to be at peace.~Michido Aoyama (From What You Are Looking For Is In The Library)

I didn't know what I was looking for until I opened the book. What I was looking for had evaded me for many years. But you find things when you need to. Or maybe when you're ready to.

Books somehow emerge for me when I'm at the library. I believe God sends me books. First, the title intrigued me, because if there's anywhere I feel happy, it's in a library. I love all the shelves of books--their redolent scent. The calm librarians with their smiles as fresh as green ferns. Other people. Tapping on computers. A toddler holding a book close to his chest. Me wandering through the aisles, the books just waiting to be opened. The page a constant friend all these years. 

In the book, What You Are Looking For Is In The Library, I meet Ryo Urase who lives in Tokyo and works for a furniture manufacturing company. He is good at his job, a trustworthy employee. He also has a dream that bloomed into his imagination when he was a teenager and bought a silver spoon in an antique store. He wondered about the spoon. Had it once graced the dining table at a mansion in England? Or had a mother once used the spoon to delicately feed her baby? Or had an elderly woman stirred her tea with the spoon, lost in the nostalgia of younger days? Ryo held on to the spoon for years as a way to remember his dream.

Ryo realizes an unexpected pathway when he meets a man who owns a bookstore where cats roam and tea and coffee are served. Ryo observes, "A cat wanders around my feet. A tabby, with a white stomach and paws. The cats all seem to be extremely relaxed and at home. I gaze around me at the books on display. It feels good to be sitting here drinking coffee and watching cats, surrounded by books. I feel content and relaxed. If I left now, my visit would still have been perfectly satisfactory."

Ryo talks to the owner of the bookstore, Mr. Yasuhara, who has written an article about the beauty of having parallel careers. Ryo asks, "Isn't it hard work to manage a shop and work for a company at the same time? Don't you ever find that either gets too much?" Mr. Yasuhara laughs lightly. "No, I don't. If anything, it's doing both that makes me feel like neither is ever too much of a burden.. Before I had the place, all I ever used to think about was quitting my office job, but now that job is what gives me the means to enjoy running the bookshop. If the bookshop was all I did, however, then I'd spend a lot more time thinking about sales strategies and so on. Which would be far more demanding. And I don't really want that."

Mr. Yasuhara asks Ryo why he wants to open an antique store and he answers, "I want to bring people together with the objects they are meant to meet. Objects that are meant to be passed on, forever, belonging to different people at different points in time. I want to be the intermediary for such encounters.. To provide a space where they might occur."

If you've read this far, you might be thinking, "Well, Priscilla, that's a nice story, but why are you sharing it?"  Because I never realized that I participated in "parallel careers" myself. I believed that I was most likely short changing either counseling or writing by attempting to do both. I sense the Lord led me to this book to provide light to what had truly happened in my life, to show me the grace He provided me for many, many years. The counseling was something I was good at and enjoyed. Paid the bills. And the writing was something I deeply loved, where I felt most alive. Writing took the edge off the stress levels that the counseling job could produce at times. And I didn't have to worry about book sales or marketing, (which I don't like much), because the counseling job provided enough money to create the books and helped to support a website. 

The two became like a snug log cabin that sheltered me for all those years. When I read this book, it was as if Ryo's story caused me to look out the cabin window and see the two parallel lines intersect to form a cross. The grace of Jesus to make one place out of two. Somewhere to be at peace. And I didn't even know what I was looking for.