My dearest book, my favourite gift from my sister Beverly, is bedraggled and weary. God's lively Word, encased in tattered cardboard, is coming unhinged.Like me, some days.
In case you've ever wondered, the Bible is the backbone behind these weekly columns. God uses it to help keep my Sunny Side Up and retrieve it when I'm hard and stepped on. (The Preacher would like you to know how very often that happens.)
I don't worship the Bible - but I believe it. God speaks life through it, when we listen. And though my copy is old and tired, the words inside remain vibrant, alive, and powerful.
Among other things, it's the Bible God uses to teach me when I'm ignorant (regularly), caution me when I'm aiming at danger, comfort me when I'm facing loss, restore my creativity when life sucks it away, and bring hope when I'm feeling hopeless.
But my particular volume of onion-skin pages is almost done in. The ends of the bright ribbons that mark my reading places have mostly frayed to fluff. The protective coating on the hard cover has nearly all peeled off.I've scribbled so many notes in the margins of my favourite passages that I can barely read the text. I've underlined some verses so often that I've almost worn clear through a few of the pages.
Oh, and the spine is missing. Entirely.
Over the last three years, in the upheaval of suddenly changed family circumstances, that pink copy of the Bible has been my lifebuoy. In the worst of times, and often in the best, it's the book I reach for first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and sometimes in between.
I've mentioned here before, the day I noticed my tiny grandaughter flipping through it reverently as it lay on the coffee table. When she noticed me watching, her beautiful face illuminated with joy, "Nana," she said, "I WUV your Bible!"
Me too, Butterfly Bean. Me too.
But likely not as much as Natan (Anatoli) Shcharansky loved his portion of God's Word. Imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag for over a decade for trying to escape to Israel , Russian authorities stripped the dissident Jew of every possession except his miniature collection of the Psalms. His jailers tried often to get that too, but Shcharansky refused to hand it over. That gained him a penalty of 130 days in brutal solitary confinement.
The Psalms kept him alive, he said later. In his autobiography, Fear No Evil, Shcharansky comments, "I took my Psalm Book, and for days on end... recited all one hundred and fifty of King David's Psalms, syllable by syllable."
Thanks to his family's tireless efforts, Scharansky gained his freedom in 1986. At his release, the guards tried again to take away his book of Psalms. He flung himself face down in the snow and refused to walk to freedom without it. The guards capitulated.
I understand Scharansky. Some things in life are more important than freedom.
