There are a lot of bookshelves in my house (at least nine) and all have “No Vacancies” signs hanging from them. Some shelves have two rows of books taking up residence that are crammed together so tight that I’ve considered leaving a can of WD-40 and a crowbar on the top of the bookshelf in order to pry them out. This population doesn’t account for the stacks of books that I have neatly, and not so neatly, piled in various places around the house—a drawer in the bathroom, the bedside table, throughout my office, and stacked behind the driver’s seat in my truck.

I don’t like to get rid of books. “Leader’s read,” one of my college professors taught me. To emphasize the point he wrote a book on the reading habits of great men including C. S. Lewis, Charles Spurgeon, and Teddy Roosevelt. Well God knows I want to lead. (He does, you know, I’ve told him many times.) So I started reading as much as I could and the books started piling up. I even had a library stamp created so that if my friends borrowed one, every time they opened the cover my book would prominently mention that they belonged back with me.

I started thinning the shelves a couple of weeks ago. Some of this action was due to marital pressure. My wife was going through the house simplifying and I knew that our bookshelves were on her list. If I didn’t have a go at them she would. But another part of my motivation was from freedom. There were volumes on my shelves that no longer had a voice in my life and their silence was taking up important space.

It wasn’t easy going through the titles in one particular corner of the living room. There were a couple shelves dedicated to leadership books, both from secular and Christian authors. My collection was library-worthy and when you read the titles out loud it is almost humorous. Here are a few that I took off the shelves not to return:

• 30 Days to Confident Leadership, by Biehl
• Understanding Leadership, by Marshall
• Excellence in Leadership, by White
• Transforming Leadership, by Ford
• Principled-Centered Leadership, by Covey
• Servant Leadership, by Greenleaf
• Christian Leadership, by Powers
• Perils of Leadership, by Prior
• Leading from the Second Chair, by Bonem
• Who’s in Charge? by Anderson
• Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, by Roberts

I’ve begun to realize that this clean up is not just about my bookshelves, it’s more about me. What kind of a person collects this many books (and trust me, this is just a subset) on the topic of leadership? An insecure one, I’m afraid. One that desperately wants to be identified as a leader and feels that he isn’t up to par. One that has a degree in church ministry but feels he’d better study a little bit more. One who wants to make the final grade, graduate at the top of the class, and be given the plumb roles at all the best ministries. One that doesn’t want to be caught not knowing. This isn’t an indictment on any of these books, some of them have some really good insights, but when they are all strung together they make for one heavy necklace.

One thick book on the shelf really stood out to me. I remember the day that I bought it. The church where I was on staff was getting ready to send out one of our pastors to plant a new church. The Sr. Pastor asked me to order this certain book by a business guru that we would be giving to him as a farewell gift. Not only did I order the book for the church planter, but I bought one for my shelf as well. It was easy to rationalize having a copy for the resource library which I made available to our church’s leadership teams, but the truth is I wanted in on the secrets too. If this is the book that we give out to the people who have made it, if this is the graduation gift that a church planter needs to be successful, then the Good Lord knows I wants one… I needs one… My precious.

It seems silly now, on this side of that job. Maybe the problem was that I didn’t read all of those books enough. Maybe it was that I didn’t apply all of their principles correctly. Then again, maybe it was because I was focused on me becoming a great, Christian leader. And when I hold that motivation up into the light of the Kingdom, it is nothing but dross. Though it has a ring of piety to it, and I can stand in a pulpit and make it sound brilliant, it really is just another clanging symbol.

There are a lot of thoughts in my heart about leadership issues, maybe enough of them to fill up the pages of a book and be marketed to ambitious, insecure men like me. But what I really want is to have a heart that is secure, one that doesn’t need power, performance, or position in order to find my identity. I want to be able to skip the leadership section at Barnes and Noble, and sometimes—like Jesus did at the last supper—instead of picking up a book, I’d like to pick up a towel.