An Excellent Return on Your Investment

Anyone who knows me well enough is probably aware that I am an avid reader. Several years ago, a question was posed in a group asking, “What if you get to heaven and God asks you how you liked his book?” Now, I don’t believe that you have to read the Bible to get to heaven, but the conversation above did start me to thinking about how much I like reading and how that would not be a pleasant thing to stand in front of God who might just ask such a question, in passing even, and I would hate to have my response be, “Well, I read an awful lot of wonderful books, God, but I didn’t quite get around to finishing yours.” I have since committed myself to reading the entire Bible (with support of many in my family who are doing it with me) and it is rich, wonderful, inspiring, challenging….WHY DID I WAIT SO LONG?!

I ran across an entry that Kathleen Norris wrote about the Bible in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith and it inspired this current drawing. She writes of a man that she and her husband ran across in a diner one evening, a man they knew to be a hard-working old-timer but didn’t really know very well. She writes, “He happened to be in a talkative mood that evening” and this is what he shared:

“Out of the blue, Arlo began talking about his grandfather, who had been a deeply religious man, or as Arlo put it, “a damn good Presbyterian.” His wedding present to Arlo and his bride had been a Bible, which he admitted he had admired mostly because it was an expensive gift, bound in white leather with their names and the date of their wedding set in gold lettering on the cover. “I left it in its box and it ended up in our bedroom closet,” Arlo told us. “But,” he said, “for months afterward, every time he saw grandpa he would ask me how I liked that Bible. The wife had written a thank-you note, and we’d thanked him in person, but somehow he couldn’t let it lie, he’d kept after him. “Well,” he said, “the joke was on me. I finally took that Bible out of the closet and I found Grandad had placed a twenty-dollar bill at the beginning of the book of Genesis, and at the beginning of every book of the damn thing, over thirteen hundred dollars in all. And he knew I’d never find it.’”

“We laughed over this with Arlo, and he began talking about the interest he could have made had he found that money sooner. ‘Thirteen hundred bucks was a lot of money in them days,’ he said, shaking his head.”

That story makes me sad. It seems to me, anyway, that after all those years, it was the thought of the money he could have made on investing the first $1300 that was uppermost in his mind.

I’m also more than a little sad when I think about all those years I could have been reading the Bible and reaping the rewards of the investment and commitment which came later in my life. Thank goodness the “theory of compounding interest” doesn’t put those of us who start reading the Bible later in life at a disadvantage (except maybe in Bible Trivia). I think God has promised us excellent returns on any investment we make in discovering his Bible, don’t you agree?

The Bible is a gift…why do some of us (including me) wait so long to open it?