Books of blessing

NICK EICHER: Today is Tuesday, September 24th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD:And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Lending Libraries, part three!

So far we’ve heard from families turning away from the public library and to the lending library movement. Their discontent with the public library is the common thread.

NICK EICHER: But today, WORLD’s Myrna Brown concludes her series with a Texas family who started a lending library for a very different reason.

ANNIE CUNNINGHAM: Ok…these are the Christian books. These are the holiday books. These are the early reader books….

MYRNA BROWN: It’s not often you walk into a room full of books and your librarian is a 4 foot, 6 inch, 10-year-old. Meet Annie Cunningham.

ANNIE: That’s grandma…

She’s pointing to a frame of a picture of her grandmother resting against a wall.

ANNIE: She wanted to have a library and um… when she died we decided to build this library for her.

Annie is too young to remember all of the details, so her mother, Elizabeth picks up the story.

ELIZABETH CUNNINGHAM: My mom loved books and children’s books in particular. She was the school librarian at a small private school.

Elizabeth says in 2019 the two talked about starting their own lending library.

ELIZABETH: And she liked the idea but we had plenty of other things going on. So, we never really did anything with it.

Then in 20-20 an ovarian cancer diagnosis.

ELIZABETH: She passed away exactly a year later.

Cunnigham says after her 62-year-old mother’s death, family and friends wanted to know how they could help.

ELIZABETH: You know how people would give gifts, in lieu of flowers or something.

Donors gave 50 thousand dollars and the idea of a private lending library resurfaced. Cunningham says they used the money to convert an old bedroom in her parent’s house into a lending library. Their church donated the book shelves. And they bought the books online.

ELIZABETH: So our library is called Living Literature Favorites Library. We called it that because that’s my mom’s initials. LLF.

About a year after her mother’s death, Elizabeth Cunningham opened the LLF library and quickly realized she needed more space. And in Dallas, that can get expensive. So, they decided to move the library into their house. But that required a home makeover.

MYRNA TO ANNIE: Were you excited to watch it being built?

ANNIE: Yes, I was so excited. But I was also kind of frustrated because we couldn’t be in our house while it was being built because the whole roof was off!

Annie, her parents and two siblings moved in with her grandfather for six months. When they returned to their home, it was the only two-story house on the block. Part of the new construction includes a long playroom that opens into a 20x20, five-thousand book library. Today is library day.

AUDIO: [PARKER KIDS ARRIVING]

Shae Parker and her two kids are the first to arrive and scamper up the stairs. The eight and ten year olds head straight for the playroom’s mini fridge to reap the benefits of meeting this week’s reading challenge.

PARKER KIDS: Oh, there’s no more of these and I wanted these.

After their ice cream treat, it’s through the glass french doors and into the library they go. Another mom, Ashley Smith and her three daughters come in next. And bringing up the rear, Alex Cosse, a mom of four. She's a friend of a friend.

ALEX COSSE: And when Ashley told me, Alex there’s this library and she has beautiful classical books. They've been waiting to come today.

CHRISTIAN COSSE: Whoa!

That’s Alex’s 12-year-old son, Christian.

CHRISTIAN COSSE: This is my kind of place.

Along with the Cosses, Cunningham says ten other new families started coming to the library this year.

ELIZABETH: It seems radical or shocking to have sort of an open door policy on your own home and I guess it is, but we’re happy to do it. To this point, it’s always been somebody who found out about it through somebody I do know. There’ve been some points of connection that made me feel very comfortable with how it’s gone. And just trust the Lord.

MOM ASKING QUESTION: So Annie, is there a number of books…

Families pay a one-time security deposit and a yearly fifty dollar fee that covers buying more books and supplies like ice cream for the kids and coffee for the parents.

MIGUEL PICARTE: I love coming here and probably the only dad you’ll see among us.

That’s Miguel Picarte. He is indeed the only dad I saw in the bunch. He’s been bringing his 12-year-old daughter Grace to the LLF library since its inception. Growing up in Puerto Rico, he wasn’t a reader until he started coming here and reading volumes of books with his daughters.

PICARTE: I mean we plowed through that whole series and it was very enriching to me and my daughters and it opened me up.

For Mandy Cowden, it’s not just about the books.

ANDY COWDEN: Thursdays are about relationships as well as just checking out good books. Elizabeth and Micah, her husband exhibit a generosity of spirit that you don’t see a lot.

But Cunningham says it’s her family that benefits the most. Like other families who start lending libraries, the Cunninghams have learned how to serve and to better love others. But they say they’ve also experienced the love of a heavenly Father, who gives beauty for ashes.

ELIZABETH: We started this project essentially the week after my mom passed away. So in that year after she passed, I spent a lot of time with my sisters and with my dad and also with my mom’s friends. Talking a lot about her. And that was really helpful and just a blessing to me.

AUDIO: Annie, would you like to show them where to find all the sections?

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Myrna Brown in Dallas, Texas.

AUDIO: This is non-fiction…this is geography…. These are stem….

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