And Zechariah came alive

Last night we went to one of our favorite watering holes and ...

... there it was!

When the owner saw me, he reached under the counter and whipped out the small Bible I had been missing for weeks. It was like being reunited with an old friend.

I had been reading the Minor Prophets out of it and, after I lost it, somehow reading the Minor Prophets in another Bible wasn't the same.

This morning I return to reading out of my re-discovered Bible and ... Zechariah comes into focus!

I am persuaded that feeding out of the Word of God requires more than just the words printed on any page in any Bible. The words are most fruitful when printed on a page in my Bible. And not just any of my Bibles.

For Zechariah to light up, it needed to be this Bible; this one that was lost and now found, as it were.

And it probably helped that Zechariah, in this Bible, lit up in the midst of familiar surroundings: at home, early in the morning, with the landscape outside still emerging in the light, with my markings in pencil (precisely these markings), with my computer nearby, with me still clothed in my bathrobe, with my heart still clothed in the quiet of the early morning.

And Zechariah came alive.

I am not trying to limit the power of the Word of God. I am just saying that the Word of God mysteriously dwells with us, and extends to the objects and surroundings we have subsumed, and that have subsumed us, in our dwelling on earth.

This includes the feel of familiar pages, pages in a book that has been a friend, because they are pages I've had conversations with.

David rejected sword and armor, and chose to go to battle against Goliath using five smooth stones and a sling.

He had to use what he was familiar with.

And power came through it.

Logos2Go

1 Samuel 17.39-40 ... and David strapped his sword over his armor. And he tried in vain to go, for he had not tested them. Then David said to Saul, "I cannot go with these, for I have not tested them." So David put them off. Then he took his staff in his hand and chose five smooth stones from the brook and put them in his shepherd's pouch. His sling was in his hand, and he approached the Philistine ...