I've always loved maps, but I haven't always loved the Bible.
Sometimes I had it right and it stuck mostly, memorizing scripture, like a poem in your pocket:) Or a cross.
Over years, God's Word became dead to me, as dead as Tevye's daughters*---still alive to their lovers, but rejected, ignored, seemingly forgotten.
I opened the bestseller, the life-changer, the illuminated text.
It lay flat.
Black or red, the font color mattered none, it was Greek to me. If only I had known about the copywork.
A few years later my daughter and I pressed Prismacolor leads to yellowed paper week after week. Great books we didn't completely understand, Paddle-to-the-Sea, Minn of the Mississippi, others, informed the mapwork, instructing us as we traced, etched, copied. Rivers blue, states green, trails hunchbacked curving up, then down for hundreds of miles, mountains upside down and V's.
The great books became our American story over a year. My daughter and I treasured them as we mapped the characters' journeys over hill and dale. We slapped our maps up on the wall with sticky tack. They hang there still, the edges curling up so, aging nicely as a five-year superhero zooms past, then a swishing setter tail gives the Eastern US a good whack. We come home and find it lying on the wood floor.
Years before, hallowed, hollowing hunger squatted inside
Longing for a satisfying meal.
I wanted to hurl all the volumes I was reading about the Book, this bestseller, life-changer, illuminated text,
At my kind, deep friends,
The ones who sat together encscribing it on their own hearts and each other's with pens of fire. They did a simple act, of turning a piece of notebook paper on its side.
They turned the paper, turned to pages in the Word, and it turned them upside down.
I hadn't realized it was all around me, they were all around me, this living, working entity of love until I could smell it, like my neighbor's smoking barbeque on a fall night. I wanted some of that.
I missed the memo about the homework, the copy work. They copied scripture, and put it in their own words. It was like learning Geography. To learn maps, you map. Copying corners and curves, boundaries and borders. To learn God's word, they wrote it, copying curves, letters, ball and stick, sloping, typed. They felt it with their fingers, read it with their eyes, mouths, and retold the story to themselves, to one another, again and again.
The Word Lives whether we want it to or not; engage the living Word---Jesus, and He engages us to engage others.
That sweet striped-socked girl and I could have copied the U.S., the world by our lonesomes, but I'm so glad we got lost in the stories instead. My sweet girl could have spouted capitals and states back to me in a breath. But we traced and copied each word with care, the great skillet handle of Florida, the encircled star of D.C., she, learning for the first time, me remembering renewed.
My Bible-reading friends could have copied alone or kept their findings to themselves. But they shared. They retold the story to one another, to me, anyone who would listen! In community, with friends, family, a group. Don't miss the crucial bones of the work: ordinary words become extraordinary together.
Because when we speak God's story and share it, God creates transformation and transparency, etching it into our very souls. Because who doesn't want to hear something good, something life-changing, illuminated?
When was the last time that #1 bestseller of all time changed how you live?
Try turning the paper with me.
- Take a sheet of notebook paper and turn it horizontal.
- Draw two vertical lines to make three columns, like this.
- Copy a few verses: three to five? Smaller is better, but more than two for context.
Column 1: copy the verses verbatim.
Column 2: Write each verse in your own words.
Column 3: Create an I will.... What is something doable, tangible I can do based on what I read? Smaller is better! One great act of love is just 10 small ones completed over a season.
Share your small story what God is doing in you with someone and see what happens. You might find yourself turned on your side, in a good way, living a story you've always wanted to love.
- Christina H.
*Fiddler on the Roof, anyone?
