Bibles and Tennis Shoes

For Christmas this year I got two new Bibles and I am planning to get at least one new pair of tennis shoes. One obvious question would be why I want these things given that I already have more than one Bible and more than one pair of tennis shoes. One answer is that things to eventually wear out. I am more attached to falling apart bibles than tennis shoes, but I don't like completely getting rid of either because I always think they might come in handy for something someday. Sometimes they do. When I went to Zambia I went through the house and found more than a dozen Bibles and New Testaments that we have accumulated from various sources (old pew bibles from when Anastasia's parents' church got new ones, the ames library book sale, the used christian bookstores in Springfield, MO, and of course Christmas gifts in years past) and took them with me to Zambia and gave them away to people who had never had a Bible at all. I often had people see I was an American and come up and ask me if I could get a Bible for them. So of course now that the stock has been thinned out a little bit, I am back to accumulating. The other reason I tend to accumulate both tennis shoes and bibles is the American obsession with specialization. I have the cleats for soccer or football, high tops for basketball, and running shoes for distance running. Same thing with Bible translations. More on that in the next post.