Attention, readers: does anybody know where my stuff is? Anybody?
Anyone who has ever moved house and home (and that includes every preacher under the sun) can relate to the frustrations of moving. Add to that delight the additional joy of moving an office, and you'll understand why I am applying for early retirement. (As soon as I can figure out who to apply to, anyway.)
As regular readers of this column will know (and you both know who you are), we recently moved our home and office to Jackson, Tennessee, where I am serving as Executive Vice President of Union University. We have added a Managing Editor and an Office Manager -- now all we need is to find the rest of our stuff.
Oh, it's not that we have a shortage of stuff. I think some of the boxes actually reproduced on the truck. We actually had to rent a 10' x 10' mini-warehouse storage unit just to keep some of our stuff, since there's not room in the office. So if you need a back issue from 1989, it's probably there.
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It's the more recent stuff I'm having a hard time finding. Like pencils ... and pens. And rulers and scissors. And important notes I wrote to myself. I'm sure there's a box in my garage that's full of such things, but for the life of me I can't find it.
It's a similar story on the home front. I've actually got a home office with bookself-lined walls (I know, fellow preachers -- the drooling can commence). And I was on fire the first few days of unpacking -- a relative blitzkrieg of box-opening, paper-wadding, and book-placing. But now that I'm through the good books and into the more mundane unpacking (things like old files, "Simple Sermons for Simple Preachers" booklets, and assorted pastoralia), the energy is long gone. I'm about to accept that stack of boxes in the corner as a permanent part of the decorating scheme.
It's been a month now since we moved into our home (and three months since we moved the office), and it is reaching the stage where I'm giving up on some stuff. Local office supply stores can replace some of it; other items will probably prove their relative unimportance when I learn that I was able to live without them after all.
The most positive part of the move involves stuff we found that we didn't know was lost. Like a box of submissions to Preaching that arrived in late 1993 and early 1994.I didn't know that box had snuck off in the dark of night long ago, only to be uncovered during our move. We've begun plowing through these items -- some pretty good stuff was hiding in this box -- and some of it has already seen the light of day in Preaching On-Line. So if you sent something during that time and we never responded, it's not that we're rude -- just clumsy.
And as for the rest of the stuff: if it shows up during your next move, just send it on. We'll be waiting for it.