Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: BOOK(S) - Begins January 4 / Ends January 11 (01/04/18)
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TITLE: Generational Book | Previous Challenge Entry
By Rebecca Lunn
01/11/18 -
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I have come to love one book above all books from an early age. The book is my Bible.
When my grandmother and my mother—along with us five young children—emigrated to America, my grandmother’s Chinese Bible did not get left behind. I have seen my grandmother pore over her Bible like it was a treasure map. I remember one time piling a few books on a table with a heavy thud. My grandmother screeched at me and I jumped back in fright. “You must never put other books on top of the Bible. The Bible belongs on the top. Always!” She slid the Bible from under my books and laid it reverently on the top of the stack. That made such an impression on me that years later I could still feel guilt if ever my Bible was not at the top of a stack of books.
As our family slowly assimilated into the new culture, my mother made sure our Chinese language was not neglected. Every day when we returned home from school there were no cookies and milk waiting. Instead, it was my mother who would sit patiently like a school teacher requiring each child to read one hour of Bible aloud to her; first from a Chinese Bible, and then from an English one. She would have a brown wooden chopstick in her hand to tappity-tap the rhythm of the Bible passage we recited. When we became teenagers, my mother’s choice of discipline would be to write a Bible verse on the door of the white refrigerator with a thick black felt pen that would never fail to convict us. Every time we went to open the fridge to get a drink of milk we would see God’s Word blaring, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.” To effectively curtail the amount of complaining, she would have the adolescent whiner write on the fridge: “Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.” It worked.
Through the years, the Bible truths that had been instilled into the molecular marrow of my soul shielded me through the typical bombardment of jarring troubles most people encounter. By hiding inside the refuge of “rejoicing in the Lord always,” my mother and I were completely cured from depression without medication. By hanging onto the “Rock of our salvation,” my husband and I have escaped daunting temptations to part ways during our forty-two years of marriage. By acting on fresh revelations from God’s word, I have developed spiritual tactics to disentangle my son from the demons of death, debt, divorce, and depression. By faithfully following the financial wisdom found in the Biblical text, we own our home and enjoy the peace of a debt-free lifestyle. Indeed, the Bible is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path effectively delivering me from all my fears.
Provoked by a craving for even more intoxicating power obtained from reading the Bible, my son and I accepted my mother’s challenge to systematically read through the entire Bible in one year. I was forty years old back then and my son was thirteen. His first attempt was a thick picture Bible, after which he graduated to a modern translation without pictures. At the end of 2017, both of us just finished reading the Bible for the twenty-third time in twenty-three years. My son is now forty years old and I just turned sixty-four.
Like my grandmother, I am now poring through the Bible like a treasure map. This time not in Chinese, but in its original languages: Hebrew and Greek. Though inexpert by far, I am utterly delighted I can slowly and meaningfully decipher the jots and tittles mentioned by Jesus. If heaven and earth can pass away, but not one jot nor one tittle of God’s Word will, then how undeniably unshakable the foundation of my life by now must be.
Now that I am a grandmother (and my own grandmother is in heaven), my hopes are that my grandchildren will inherit the proclivity of inclining with respect towards the Bible as the lively words of a living God. I hope that they will love one book above all other books. And I hope that book is the Bible fixed on the top of the stack—in fondness, and not in fright.
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This was, indeed, well written.