WORDS TO LIVE BY: The self help lie

One of the prizes of being the pastor at First Lutheran in Hayward is that the pastor’s study has 120 feet of bookshelf space. Lutheran pastors come out of the scholarly tradition — it is a master’s degree — and with that comes a lot of reading and a great many books. And like most pastors I am a bibliophile — a book lover. 

I have Bibles and Bible books, commentaries, lives of the saints, famous church personalities over the years, books in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, reference books, history books, biographies and autobiographies, mysteries and suspense (no romance books as I consider them one of the most insidious forms of fiction there is), psychology and sociology books, joke books and satire. But there is one type of book I do not have.