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Topic: Black (10/15/09)
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TITLE: The Boy in All Black | Previous Challenge Entry
By Leigh Ann Webb
10/17/09 -
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This Bible now resides safely on my bookcase. As an adult, I have a house full of other Bibles: Scoffield Study Bibles, Women’s Devotional Bibles, Bibles received at graduations, Children’s Devotional Bibles, baby dedication Bibles, Gideon Bibles, the King James Version, the NIV version, even extra Bibles in the car for those Sunday emergency situations when you forget to carry the one from home. Who wants to be caught at church without a Bible? That would just be wrong. As a Christian, a Bible should be the most sacred item we carry but it has often become the most common place. We rely more on our cell phones and blackberries than we do on our Bible. Be honest, which do you grab first in a crisis?
Although I have heard and have been moved by numerous sermons about the importance of the Bible in the Christian life, I have never had its genuine significance inscribed so indelibly on my heart as I did recently from a boy in all black who walked into a small teen group at my church. As the teens from our church sat chatting and laughing about their day in their Christian affiliated T-shirts and other trendy colorful arrays of clothing, in walked a stranger to the group. He stood out immediately from the rest of the teens. He was wearing black from head to foot – black converse tennis shoes, black jeans, a tight fitting black long-sleeved shirt with matching black vest, black bracelets on each arm, a black ring on his pinky finger , a black dog-collar type necklace and to top it all off a black fedora with thin white pinstripes which he had pulled down almost to the point where you could not see his eyes.
Some of the other adults probably balked at the sight, but since I work daily as a public high school teacher I took his appearance with stride. I am accustomed to the students that other kids label as “goth” or “emo.” Typically, these students are the ones who are either trying to find their own personal identity in a very eccentric way or they like the sheer shock value. My experiences have been that students in all black are often musically or artistically talented and actually have a lot to offer but are sometimes too quiet to ever be heard. They blend into the blackness of the monochrome they wear. This boy was no exception. He came complete with earphones to block out others and a notebook where I have no doubt he had written pages and pages of song lyrics, poems or short stories that deep down he wanted someone to ask about.
It was not the appearance of this child that would end up shocking me; it was in the sheer honesty of his words. As one youth after another repeated their Bible verse for the week, showed their Bible and won points, this boy sat to himself in a bean bag aloof from the rest of the crowd, almost deliberately trying to seem disinterested and unaffected by the fact that he was an outsider to this group of Christian teens. When he was asked about his Bible verse, he said, “I don’t know it.” When asked about his Bible, he said “I’ve never had one.” And I, who had been surrounded by Bibles since I was a young child, who had a house full of Bibles and even extras in the car, suddenly felt the impact that this book could make on a life and on this boy in all black.
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Good Story.