Consume It

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

My Grandma H. was a cook. Seriously; she owned a restaurant for a while and then was a cook at the local hospital for years. She not only cooked marvelously, but she knew how to present the food. Even after she was widowed, she took time to make her food attractive at meal time.

You can imagine how wonderful it was to go to her house for Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. I remember the table full of food...and it was beautiful.

Now, consider for a moment the work that she put into it to make it wonderful. Yet the highest honor we could give to her labor was not to sit and look at the beautiful table, admiring the feast and doing nothing to disturb the lovely presentation. No, the highest honor we could give her was to dig in, mess it up, and consume it. After the meal, the table no longer had the beautiful appeal...in fact, it could be downright disgusting, if there were poultry bones about. But the meal served its purpose, and we were sustained (ok, fattened).

That's kind of how I look at a Bible. In every class that I've taught young people my marking system, someone has expressed concern that they would be defacing the Word of God by marking in it. One young lady's mother even forbade her to mark in her Bible when I gave the class Bic pens and the assignment to mark Galatians. But, like Grandma's table, God's Word is not meant to be memorialized but consumed. The highest honor we can give the Word is not to put it on a shelf and hold it untouchably sacred; it is to dig into it, study it, and make it a part of our everyday living. Sure, it may not stay pretty and neat, but if we are to become Living Epistles, that Word must get into us and transform us. Whatever we need to do to the physical book to make that happen is ok; that's why God gave it to us.

But here's a practical idea: I've recommended to folks who really have a hang up about Bible marking to go at it in a low risk fashion. Purchase an inexpensive (even paperback) Bible to mark. See if it/how it works for you.

And dig in. ;)