“Shelf Awareness” is a daily e-newsletter I (Dan) often scan. One of the regular items is “Book Brahmin” which shares a selected author’s answers to the following:

On your nightstand now
Favorite book when you were a child
Your top five authors
Book you've faked reading
Book you're an evangelist for
Book you've bought for the cover
Book that changed your life
Favorite line from a book
Book you most want to read again for the first time

Today in the “Book Brahmin” section, Andrea Busfield’s response to book that changed your life was, “Can a book change your life? I'm not sure it can. I think it can influence the way you think for a time, but it's usually people and events that create change. There again, I suppose it could be argued that the Bible and the Quran have changed billions of lives.…”

As a Christian publisher, I’d like for books to be life changing. But this morning I’m realizing that it is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, not the Bible, that changes lives. I don’t think it downgrades the value of books to move them to the category of tools (or pathways) for change.

I’m trying to remind myself that it’s good for things to not always stay the same. This is the first day of a new semester and Sierra is tipping the scale that balances work at Barclay Press and seminary education. Starting this week she will be in the office two afternoons a week. Kaitlin has been here three months now and is quickly learning a lot of what Sierra used to regularly do along with some of what Liz did.

Things don’t always stay the same and that is okay.

We have some training and transition going on at Barclay Press. Liz Barr has been working at Barclay Press for ten years. She manages the boxes coming in and packages going out—Sunday school curriculum orders, Fruit of the Vine subscriptions, and book orders. She handles the details of orders and uses her proficiency with boxes and tape to move our publications to the users. But Liz has been given a new opportunity and Kati and Kaitlin are now starting to learn the things Liz has been doing.

Liz’s new position is with Visiting Angels (senior home care) as the receptionist in the Newberg office.

The most recent handout made available online for churches features Fruit of the Vine. Each quarter volunteer writers contribute daily devotional readings. Writers for the January, February, March quarter are pictured.

“LaHaye Pens New Series for Zondervan.” Things like this are going to turn me [Dan] into an old curmudgeon that finds it much easier to see what is wrong than to point the spotlight at what is right. I just can’t see another apocalyptic series as something that expands the kingdom of God.