It feels as if the Bible has always been a part of my life, almost as if a part of my cellular makeup. At least, I can’t remember a time when it has not. Given that my parents were devout Christians for whom the Bible was central to their lives, I am sure they were reading the Bible to me even as an infant.
My first conscious memory, however, is of the time when Mother bought a children’s Bible and read a story from it every night as she tucked my sisters and me into bed. I have vivid memories of the book’s end sheets. They showed a picture of rays of sunshine streaming through the clouds. I was never quite sure what the imagery was meant to convey—a vision of the first day of creation or of the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven.
We were Baptists, and so as an elementary-school student, I was taught to use my Bible in Sunday evening sword drills. This is a popular Southern Baptist practice where children line up at the front of a room. An adult yells out a verse of Scripture, like Amos 7:2. Then every child scrambles in his or her Bible to be the first one to find the verse. In Sunday school class we were required to memorize the names of all the books of the Bible in order—all 66 of them.
One thing I admire about this Baptist training is that it teaches a person to navigate the Bible, even if you misunderstand what you find. You don’t need a table of contents to find a particular book or verse. The training has served me in good stead through the years.
The Bible of my childhood was the King James Version. The unspoken assumption was that this translation was divinely inspired. So I duly read my Bible in 17th century English, even if it didn’t often make sense. All that changed when I was a teenager, and my Dad brought home a new translation of the New Testament. The New English Bible had just come off press. Its goal was to put the Bible’s message in contemporary speech. When I opened this translation and read a few passages, I felt as if I was encountering a brand new book. The message was no longer archaic. It leaped alive. Old, familiar passages spoke with a vividness I had never before experienced. The sword of the Spirit had a sharp, new cutting edge.
I frankly fell in love with the Bible from that moment. And it is the longest love affair of my life (my wife did not arrive until some 25 years later).
I have been reading and studying the Bible ever since with never flagging interest. There have been times in my life when my Christian faith skated on thin ice. There have been times when I have wanted to throw Christianity overboard. So deep was my anger and confusion. But there was always one thing I could never discard: my fascination with the Bible. I keep reading it, trying to understand its mysteries, and being seduced by it. And now I have a lifetime of discoveries and reflections about this amazing book.
I am creating this blog to provide a way to share some of my experiences, thoughts, reflections, and questions that have emerged from this lifetime of being in conversation with the Bible. I hope that this sharing will be meaningful to others. So, if you are a new reader, I invite you to join me in conversation with and about the Bible. It’s a spring that never runs dry.
The Bible's in My Blood 