Finding Faith, part 3: My Beef with the Bible
The Bible. The Good Book. God’s Word. Whatever you want to call it, is about 1,200 single-ply toilet paper thick pages of eye-straining tiny print. It was written between 2,000 and 4,000 years ago and compiled into its current form around the 5th century. (That’s correct. The Bible didn’t just float down from the heavens. It was compiled by real people.) In English alone, there are 450 different translations of the Bible, which means there are 450 different ways to read the same story in one language. Beyond English, the Bible, or a portion of it, has been translated into nearly every language on Earth. No other story has that track record.
That’s a big book.
A big book, that I have a long bumpy history with.
In the fall of my 8th grade year, my church handed me my very first Bible. The honest truth is that I was excited about it. I had so much confusion and so many questions about God up to that point in my life that I felt like I was holding the literal holy grail in my hands. Yes, this book would answer all my questions. My confusion would be gone.
I went home with my crisp new King James in my hand determined to read the entire thing that year. Never mind that it was 1,200 pages and I wasn’t a great reader. This was the key to unlocking my confusion!
So alone in my room, I started on page one. Okay, God made everything out of thin air…that seemed far-fetched, but I kept going. Okay, that Adam guy totally threw his wife under the bus about that apple and snake thing (note to self: pick your future husband wisely). Cain and Abel…yeeeesh! So rude!
It was going okay until about page 5 when I got to this part:
“And Seth lived a hundred and five years, and begat Enos;
And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters;
And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years; and he died
And Enos lived ninety years and begat Cainan.” (Gen 5:6-9 KJV)
…you get the point.
At 13 years old, I was a slow reader, didn’t know what “begat” meant, and was bored out of my mind. So I closed my Bible, put it in my desk, and never tried reading it again.
My hard-to-read Bible sat in my desk drawer until one winter break when I came home from college. As moms routinely do when their college kids come home from school, she handed me a trash bag and told me to clean my room. “Throw your garbage in the garage and make a donate pile for anything that’s still good,” she said.
If you read part 1 of this series, you know exactly where I stood in my beliefs during college.
You guessed it. I put my Bible straight into the trash bag.
(It’s about right now, anyone reading this is taking a proverbial step back from me so the lightning doesn’t ricochet off of me and hit them. Thanks for taking my honesty for what it is – honest.)
I never even considered the donate pile, because why on Earth would I subject anyone to that. When my mom found the Bible at the bottom of the trash bag, she, in calculated grace and parenting, simply took it out of the bag and calmly said, “oh, we shouldn’t throw this away.” She didn’t condemn or shame me, she simply put it back in my drawer, and we didn’t talk any more about it.
About a decade later, after my Grandma’s passing, I felt more confused than ever about God. Wait, does God listen? Can I actually talk to God? What does God think of me? What does God think of people in general? I had a new flurry of questions that I needed to find answers to once and for all.
At that point, I was just flat out scared and mad at the Bible. Scared because I had seen clergy use the Bible to knock people down (figuratively, not literally) and I had watched people I loved fight over the validity or invalidity of the Bible. Mad because I had tried reading it before and I felt like I wasn’t smart enough to understand it.
The Bible was my arch-nemesis. Without a doubt, I actively avoided it.
But I had two choices, I could either keep assuming things about the Bible and keep being angry about it or I could actually read the dang thing and then decide if I was angry at the Bible or not.
I choose the latter.
So at the ripe age of 30, I headed down the same path that I did in 8th grade. Only this time, I read the Bible on an app on my phone (thank you technology) and with an English translation I actually understood (thank you good people of Tyndale for writing the New Living Translation for me).
For an entire year, I read 15 minutes a day to make it through the whole thing. I replaced my anger with curiosity and read it with an open mind. I also read it without anyone knowing, because I was embarrassed. How many years did you spend in church? Shouldn’t you know this by now? It’s it a little late to the game to be reading the Bible at 30, isn’t it? You know, your husband didn’t marry a woman who hunkered down with a Bible every day. What will he think? He might tease you.
He most definitely would not have teased me. But I hid my reading, nonetheless.
It turns out, the Bible had a lot of different stuff in it. There’s a lot of Israel’s ancient history in there. And poems. And all those “proverbs” people are quoting today? They’re from the Bible too. Oh, and four different people all wrote about the life of Jesus, and the guys who put the Bible together must not have been able to agree on which one to include, so they just put all four of them in there. One right after another. Like Jesus on repeat. And then there’s letters written to people. The letters aren’t written to us, but to really specific people with really specific problems a long time ago.
But what I learned, most importantly, was that most of the things I had been angry about or had been taught in church weren’t actually in the Bible at all. Go figure.
The demons I feared didn’t actually exist. There was no “don’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent” in the Bible. It never once said I was going to hell for watching MTV in my teenage years. And Jesus never once told anyone to go to church every Sunday.
He just told them to love God and each other. …Fascinating.
About 80% of the way through my reading, I felt the urge to hold a real Bible – to see the words on paper and not on my phone app. I wanted to own a real Bible again, but I was still embarrassed. So when the Amazon box arrived on the front step, I quickly snuck it under my arm and ran to our bedroom with it. I closed the door and ripped opened the box.
It was beautiful. It was light blue imitation leather and hardy. And it was mine. And I wasn’t angry at it. Still confused by many of the things in it, yes, but not angry.
My husband walked into the room and innocently asked “What’d ya’ get?” In way too snappy of a tone, I blurted out, “A Bible! I bought myself a Bible and used my own money, okay?” Clearly, I was the only one who felt I was on trial about this purchase.
And because this was only a big deal and embarrassing to me, he responded, “Oh, cool. I didn’t know you wanted a Bible. I wouldn’t have given you one for Christmas.” There was no teasing.
But the truth was, I needed to buy myself a Bible. For some reason, that was part of the healing.
Within a couple of months, I had finished reading the Bible. Cover-to-cover. Word-for-word. There was no more confusion about what was in there. No more anger about it. I could agree or disagree with what was in it. I could study it further to understand. But never again would I not know what was in there.
All of God’s mysteries weren’t revealed to me on the day I finished reading it (February 13, 2018…but who’s counting), but I don’t think that’s the intent of the Bible either.
Maybe understanding God is simply an evolving process for all of us, no matter our past.
PS – You’ll be happy to know that I haven’t thrown a Bible in the garbage since 2005. I’m safe to stand next to now. I don’t think there’s any lightning coming my way. ;o)
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Finding Faith, part 1: When Your Childhood Church Misses the Mark
Finding Faith, part 2: The Prayer That Changed Everything
Finding Faith: Epilogue - The Prayer That Changed Everything
