When Scripture Glistens in the Ditch
As soon as I legally changed my name after marrying Wade, I drove straight to the Christian bookstore. I wanted a new Bible with my new name engraved. Why? Because that’s the kind of Christian-nerd-girl I am, even in my thirties, that’s why. It had been awhile since I’d had a new Bible, and now here was a good excuse with a new me. Casey Cole Higginbotham.
I started toting it to Church and using it for my reading every morning. One Monday, I couldn’t find it. I looked in every room and finally just grabbed another. Misplacing items is, well, not exactly surprising to me. Maybe it was in the car. Maybe I left it somewhere.
That evening during golden hour, there came a knock on the door. The dog howwwwwled. I peeked out the window. A woman I didn’t know. If you’re anything like me, you’ll understand that a million possible scenarios ran through my head. She’s here to kidnap me. She’s here to give me a million dollars. She’s here to tell me someone I love is dead. She’s here because God came to her in a dream and told her to come tell me the plan for my life. (I don’t know! Come on: I grew up Pentecostal!)
I opened the door and immediately realized she was holding… my Bible?
I was so confused that I forgot all my hospitable manners. As I stared, trying to make it make sense, she smiled and introduced herself. She lives down and across the road. She was coming home from work and saw something glistening in the ditch. She pulled over, saw it was a Bible and collected it. She was sorry we hadn’t met yet, but assumed by the engraving that it must belong to “the new Higginbotham bride down the road.” (Gosh, I love living in the south.)
My best guess is that I sat it on top of my car, and peeled out of the driveway without noticing. Classic, I know. But ever since that day, I cannot get the mental image of my Bible on the side of the road out of my head. The sun catching those gold edges and waving from the weeds at passersby.
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Here’s something that will confuse some but shock no one: I really love the Scriptures. I always have. But my freshman year of college, when I started learning about it in new ways, really shook me to the core. The Bible wasn’t as simple as it was when I was a child. The things I learned scared me about it, and, therefore, about my faith. Noah’s ark was no longer about cute animals going two-by-two. It was about a God who could and would cancel his creation. The gilded edges weren’t so glittery anymore.
So even in that time when I felt confused and distant toward the Scriptures, and thereby me and God, I still longed for them. The Scriptures were never just about moral code to me; they had always been how Rickie Moore describes the Bible as an altar— a meeting place for me and God. Could I still trust the Bible? Could I still trust the Bible’s God?
* * *
The work I did to understand what the Bible is and how it ought be read is probably the most important work I’ve ever done in my life. Not just because it’s meaningful to me personally, but because I meet a lot of people for whom the Bible is in the ditch, so to speak. They’ve lost it or tossed it, and either way it’s no longer a part of the journey or maybe they don’t even know when it stopped coming home with them. But I think that even in the deepest, darkest ditch, those pages still shine and beckon to those who slow as they pass it by.
If you’ve never struggled with the Scriptures, you just haven’t read enough of them. It’s certainly not all rainbows and puppy dogs as they say. I’m convinced that those difficult passages are not so much about what they say to us as they are about what they do to us. Those stories that are difficult to make sense of give us something to make sense with. We are so often asking the Bible, ‘what am I supposed to learn or do because of you?’ But it isn’t just a textbook or a rule book. Sometimes, I think it is trying to cause something in us.
Sometimes what the Holy Scriptures ‘cause’ is comfort. They can give us hope, peace, faith even. But other times they disrupt and disturb us and what we think we know. They make us wrestle with the pages, wrestle with our theology, wrestle with our world, wrestle with God. And I am convinced that something happens in the wrestling that can’t occur otherwise. Again stealing from Rickie Moore: to wrestle with God is still to have contact.
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I don’t know if you’ve ever hear of this guy, Rickie Moore? Let’s steal from him one more time. In perhaps my favorite of his works (“Prophetic Passions and the end of Jonah”), Rickie demonstrates how the book of Jonah is about God getting Jonah and, thereby, us to reveal what’s in our hearts. He says we know that Jonah is in the fish, but the real is question is: what’s inside of Jonah?
Frustratingly, the book of Jonah doesn’t really wrap up. It ends with a question and with a man who is going to have to spit out his own feelings in light of God’s heart. We don’t get to see Jonah resolve the conversation or his own heart. As Rickie says, “it denies closure not only to Jonah but also to the reader.” And yet its open ending provides to us an open invitation.
When we wrestle with the Bible we are wrestling with what we think is in the heart of God. It’s no longer just about that which is a lamp unto our feet, but he who is the light of the world. When the Bible confuses us, it usually reveals something about ourselves. And whatever it is that we find is in our hearts, we must be like the whale instead of Jonah and cough it up before God.
* * *
I know I am over-the-top when it comes to metaphor, but just go with me here. There is something so hopeful to me about the image of a soggy, road-rashed Bible in the ditch and it’s gilded edges still glistening as the downing sunlight dances on them. Just tattered and worn and disposed, but refusing to quit in the rare way that is only possible for that which is true. Truth fights to not be forgotten. The Holy Scriptures long to catch a ride and show up back at our front door. The question is: are we willing to entertain the Stranger that hosts them?
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If the Lord don’t come and the creek don’t rise,
Casey
