I did not grow up in a home that read the Bible, over even encouraged it.
Indeed, the only Bible we owned was a decaying, brown-paged Gideon’s Bible my father swiped from a hotel room.
It anchored the bookshelf on the far right, pushed back and half hidden by the more important family books: a dog-eared, spine-broken atlas and a fat unappealing dictionary. The rest of the shelf held The Golden Home and High School Encyclopedia my mother purchased one volume at a time at the grocery store.
I was in and out of that shelf all the time looking up everything in the encyclopedia but I never touched the moldering pages of the holy book.
Raised in a church that did not encourage Bible reading, I somehow knew I wasn’t supposed to read the Bible, so I didn’t.
Why I opened a Bible
The summer I was fifteen, however, I went on a Madeleine L’Engle kick and read everything she wrote that the local library owned. More than once, L’Engle commented about the need for readers and writers to read the Bible so they could better understand the literary culture of western civilization.
That sounded like a plan to me, so I dug out the old Bible and took it with us on a camping trip to Canada. When I had exhausted all the other books I brought with me, I opened it up to the first chapter of the New Testament and ran into all those begats.
I didn’t even last one chapter, slammed the musty volume shut and reread another Madeleine L’Engle book.
Another opportunity
But later that year, I started playing volleyball with some Lutherans around the corner from my house.
One thing led to another, and I began to attend their Wednesday night Bible study. Obviously, I needed a Bible.
The old stolen Bible was unappetizing, but someone in the household had acquired a paperback called Good News for Modern Man.
It was just the New Testament, but that was okay because we were studying the book of Romans, which someone told me was in the New Testament.
A newer version!
I opened it up and loved the line drawings.
I also saw all those begats, but they looked so much more appealing in large type with simple drawings and white pages.
Okay, like my father I stole it, but I read that Bible, so easy on the eyes and soul, for the next year.
A cheap paperback (even now it only costs $7.45), the binding broke and pages fell out. I held it together with a green rubber band.
I found that Good News for Modern Man tonight, still on a shelf but with the rubber band long disintegrated. In between the pages, some of which were turned upside down when last stuffed between the shiny cover, was a written reflection from the first retreat I attended.
I committed in writing on that retreat to read the Bible and to pray.
And so I have. For my entire adult life.
Words and meanings
Madeleine L’Engle may or not have approved of that paperback Bible.
She urged English majors in particular, to read the gorgeous words in the 1621 King James version.
The 1966 Good News for Modern Man gave me the stories, paraphrases of the original translation, not the beautiful words.
But it was enough to start with it and those words, sharper than a two-edged sword have not returned void.
After all, it’s the Who found in the Word that’s important, not the how I read about Him.
What was your first Bible like?
Like you, we had a family Bible we never read. It was hunkered along one side of an end table. Not till later, after I’d been married 8 years, did I get my first Bible, a Scofield King James complete with notes. I read it till it fell apart and got another one just like it. Have since “graduated” to the New King James although I think we have every version printed around here for reference.
I think I picked up that one at the 1st Presbyterian Church when I was hanging after school program.
That would explain why your name and phone number are written in pencil inside the front cover–what’s left of it! 🙂
I received the leather-bound Scofield KJV with notes as a confirmation gift. The Bible fit my parents reverent view of scripture and of the occasion. I do love it, but I realized sometime in the ’80s that I sometimes didn’t understand what I was reading and switched to the Concordia NIV. I still refer to the KJV, but now I especially enjoy going to the online Blue Letter Bible and checking out the Greek words.