Why I Carry a Bible.

Here is a bit of inside information on myself that you probably don't (care to) know. I am not a good reader. You probably can tell that I'm also not a good writer--although you are reading this so . . . Nevermind.

For the entire span of my reading career, I've read significantly slower than the average person, and that's probably why growing up I never really even liked reading. In fact, regardless of what my high school GPA said, I did not read a single book my entire high school career. Sorry to disappoint you, Mrs. Kerr.

Perhaps part of the reason I didn't enjoy reading was because finishing a 300 paged book always seemed like a daunting task, especially since it only takes reading 0.75 pages to start feeling a little woozy. By the end of the second page . . . Zzz. There was a tinge of hope glistening in my soul with the advent of the eBook. That was until my Kindle app told me I was on “e-page” 2 of 348,921--forget about it.

Despite all of this, I still carry, read, and prefer my 1120 paged Bible. Don't get me wrong, my smartphone is loaded with the new norm of Christian devotion--the Bible App--and I periodically use said app for reference and occasional spontaneous devotional reading. But I nearly never read my eBible, and here's why.

If you've read anything I've written before--including this piece--you probably noticed the myriad of typographical errors. Those errors persist despite numerous proofings (Yes, I do read these things before you do--I promise). Growing up learning how to write on word processors, my brain is programmed to looked for the squiggly red line. No lines, means no errors. The rest of the time my brain simply supplies whatever text it believes should be there. As a person who sometimes writes stuff intended to be read by others, this is a very flawed system, but in most any other circumstance, this system of storing and accessing information is extremely valuable. But my errors reveal a deeper problem that is prevalent in the “cut and paste” generation.

You may be wondering what exactly is the “cut and paste” generation. You can probably figure out that it's not a very technical term, in fact I'm not even sure if it's a generational thing, or just a thing.

To the best of my knowledge, the “cut and paste” generation is the result of the systematic way in which we cite and access information in our society. Today, knowledge exists as the convergence of millions of small digestible bytes of information. It is an extremely impressive notion to realize that I don't need to remember something if I know how to access the information when it is needed.

After all, why store all this useless information when the internet is beautifully suited for that task, and with technology I can quickly access that information within seconds of when it is needed. I can look up the name of the actor who played “George McFly” in the original Back to the Future, and find out why he wasn’t recast in the same role the rest of the series. I can simply “cut” the information from wherever it is safely stored and “paste” it into the appropriate context.

I will say however, when it comes to hermeneutics--how one reads and understands the Bible--cut and paste is not preferred.

In whole, we are already too eager as Christians to cut out our favorite scriptures and paste them into a doctrinal "best of" concordance. I don’t know of too many empirical studies of the reading habits of Christians, but in my own experience I hear far too often, “Well, the Bible says [insert text that best fits intended argument].”

In fact, a few years back, a nicely dressed Hispanic woman knocked on the faded red front-door of our house. After opening the door and exchanging the typical pleasantries, the woman said, “May I share a Bible verse with you.” I was completely overjoyed! Not because she wanted to read something out of the Bible. No, because she wanted to talk with me!

This was not the first time a nicely dressed Hispanic woman knocked on my door. On three other occasions, the creaking of the door was still resounding as the lady said, peering deep into my house, “Uh . . . does anyone here speak Spanish?” A deep sigh and a, “Ok . . . good-bye”, always follows my reply. I still don’t know what those ladies wanted, but I’m considering hanging a “Hablamos Inglés” sign on the door to prevent future disappointment.

Anyway, the woman asked if she could share with me something out of the Bible, and this is the verse she chose;

“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.” 1 Timothy 4:1 & 2.

Not the most “seeker-friendly” of Bible verses, I have to say, but I was a immediately intrigued. I’m not sure why the woman chose that verse to share with me, I wasn’t really paying attention. In fact, I interrupted her spiel that may have suggested I was following deceiving spirits by asking, “Do you know who wrote those words?”

“Well, of course,” she reply with confidence, “The Apostle Paul.”

“And by chance, do you know who Paul was writing to?” I said.

“Umm, I believe it was the Corinthians,” she retorted with noticeable hesitation.

Here was this woman, standing in front of a complete stranger to share a word from scripture, having no clue what it was that she was reading other than (a) it was in the Bible, and (b) it supported whatever “message” she was told to share with any demon followers who lived on my street. This was an obvious example of Biblical “cut and paste”.

Now, you probably guessed this nicely dressed Hispanic woman was not reading to me from her iBible app, and in turn are most likely wondering if there is a point to my little story. There is . . . I think.

The Bible is wholly sacred. I know this to be true. It is God’s Word, and that’s all well and good, but when we sound-byte scripture like a campaign stump speech, the Bible is a terrifying piece of literature that can be used to say just about anything. Case in point, the whacko “preacher” who used a couple of verses in Leviticus to claim God’s cure for AIDS was the genocide of the entire LGBT community.

So, if we as a society already have a propensity to cut and paste readily accessible information that we feel best suits our current need, then we should resist anything that makes it easier for us to handle scripture the same way. In my own experience and observation, being forced to read the Bible a little more than a few tweets worth of text at a time severely diminishes one's ability to grasp the meaning and context of the text. If I already have a desire to easily swoop in and out of a particular text of interest with relative ease, I should resist anything that actually makes that desire come to fruition. The same as I should resist the temptation to look at naked women by resisting using technology tools to fulfill that desire.

In the end, I know this is a losing battle. I’m on the wrong side of history. You won’t have to work very hard to convince me of that. I am certain my grandchildren will never hold a printed Bible, the same as my daughter will never know what a picture tube television is. Now, that doesn’t have to be such a bad thing, but we already have an innate ability to reform scripture to our own likings. In general, we treat things that we can’t see as if they are not there. We even have a saying for it; “Out of sight, out of mind.”

So, because I want to be able to visualize the flow of a story across four columns of text, because I want to see the golden spine of the hundreds of other pages that I am not reading, and because I want to feel the weight of those pages pressing into my palm, I carry my Bible.

No, that doesn’t make me any more like Jesus than anyone else, but it does ground me in the subtle truth that there is always a whole lot more to the story-- more I don’t know and more I need to discover.