According to the date written on the inside of your cover, you were a gift to me on Christmas of 2008. So for 8 years, you have been my companion to church and on family vacations. You have been stuffed in suitcases on overnight school trips and tossed in totes for a day spent writing at the local coffee shop. You have happily attended bible studies with me and rode along in the sweltering heat of my car. And 8 years of such faithful companionship is beginning to show, so with true heaviness in my heart, I believe that it is time to let go.
Granted, I never liked the commentaries the people who published you felt they needed to include so that I, as a teenager, could somehow be persuaded that the bible was relevant to my life. And it drove me crazy that you never had a true concordance. Not to mention the annoyance over your bookmark which always curled in on the end.
But for all of the attributes that annoyed me, there were so many more things that made you absolutely precious to me. I remember when I started reading you daily in middle school. I remember how all of the sudden, my eyes and heart were open, and I would find lines and verses floating around in my head randomly during the day.
And I think about the first time I read the book of Isaiah. I remember how each morning it was a treasure hunt to find another jewel, promise, or encouragement from God. I remember how I clung to those promises during seventh grade when life felt hard. I remember one distinct afternoon, laying on my bed, crying, and reading and reading those underlined promises. Now every time I turn to Isaiah 25:1, I remember that time. I remember the pain but also God's overwhelming goodness.
I think of you sitting on my cluttered desk in my college dorm room. I think of cradling you as I curled my world weary body into my lounge chair and searching for words, any words, to pray. How I clutched onto you as I marched into my first large group meeting at CRU and my small group bible study.
I flip to Psalm 42 and see the tear marks. But I also remember how reading the psalms taught me to pray. I remember mornings in the dorm room when coming to God in prayer was hard enough as it was. But you already had the words, the cries of breaking hearts and the longings of a soul for Christ. You gave me the words to keep praying even when I felt too weak to look up.
I remember the first night I really cried in college. Halfway through the semester, and I thought I couldn't take it anymore. As I turned on some of my favorite Christian music, I began to flip through your pages. Soon tears fell uncontrollably as the undeniable evidence of your love for me was plastered across every page.
You are bent, wrinkled, stain, torn, marked, highlighted, and soiled. But you are also what got one teenager through middle school, high school, and her first year of college. It is now time for me to move on. It is time for a new bible that is intact. One that has better commentary and a working concordance. Although I am excited for the crisp new pages just as I am excited for a crisp new year, this is also bitter sweet. You have seen me through some rough and even wonderful times in my life. Your words, the living and breathing words of God, sustained me. And I know that whatever bible I am reading out of, His words will continue to feed the hunger of my soul. Just as is promised in Mathew, "ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." I have asked, sought, and knocked, and lo and behold, it was given unto me.
