“I have an ice-breaker for you. Tell us about your safe place you had as a child.”

We were in our small group, gathered at a friends house and seated around the living room. I sunk back into the deep leather sectional and realized that I couldn’t remember that far back. My first internal reaction was that I don’t have many positive memories from my past. As each person described their safe places, I perused the memory files in my brain. I tried to tiptoe through my memories, trying not to disturb and awaken anything I’d rather not recall. I listened as the others described their neighborhood, their friends houses, and their playgrounds as their safe places. Finally, it was my turn, and instantly I remembered the place I felt safest as a child.

Source

The room was buried deep in the building. Down the stairs, in the basement, it was the last room at the end of the hall. The smell of old magazines and books, musty and perhaps even moldy, permeated the air. It was the room where all the old resources were kept-magazines dating back to the beginning of last century and piles of books that no one cared about.

This was a safe place.

Stacks and stacks of books and plenty of places hide, my local public library was my haven growing up. My mother worked there so I spent countless hours browsing and reading. When I was old enough to volunteer, I helped out the children’s librarian. Conveniently, she was also a children’s book author with whom I enjoyed talking about all her books. When I was even older and could get a job, this library was my first place of employment.

I loved the quiet, and being surrounded by so much that stimulated the mind and the imagination. Everything else in my life was loud, chaotic, and sometimes frightening. This place I knew was quiet and safe.

I came to know exactly where every book was located. Most of them I checked out and read at home, staying up late into the night. Mysteries, fiction, non-fiction, biographies, literature, poetry-all food for my starving mind and heart. Emily was right when she described a book as a frigate, taking us lands away. In my reading, I visited places I’ll never see, shared emotions with imaginary people who understood me, and solved all the problems in the world in mere hours of reading.

I loved checking in the books in the office and putting them back on the shelves. I especially loved having to go all the way into that dimly lit room in the basement where people seldom ventured. Putting away or retrieving old resources was an infrequent job but one I treasured. And the quiet, oh the quiet in that place…

Source

God found me even behind the stacks of shelves. He found me hiding out from the world and wishing I could bring all my things, making a nest in the back corner, by the window, next to the 200′s. I always looked at each book before shelving it, a potential world to visit I suppose. In the 200′s I found a number of books that brought the encouragement and hope my adolescent soul needed. Other than the Bible, I had few books of my own at home which were authored by Christ-followers. It was here that I found and read a book by Billy Graham, then one by Joni Earekson Tada, followed by nearly every book in the Christianity section of the library.

During those years, I gathered quotes and scriptures from those books and began filling a journal. Late, in the quiet of the night, I opened that journal and read and re-read the scrawled words of hope. It was those words, hand-copied from borrowed books, that got me through the deep, dark days of adolescence that I learned much later was depression.

God provides us safe places, refuge from storms. And then He meets us there. My favorite name of God is “Strong Tower,” described in Psalm 61. It’s in these places of safety where He finds us, quiets our hearts, and heals our wounded souls.

Friends who know me well joke about the number of books I own and the fact that I am usually reading six or seven books at one time. Yet books have always been part of my safe place. It was in a place full of books where God found me and showed me that He was my true Safe Place.

What safe places have you had in your life?

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