"Learning, Following, Growing"

Several of my favorite scriptures in the Bible are located in the Old Testament, but sometimes, reading from it leaves me feeling my ability to grasp what I’m reading is beyond what I’m capable of understanding. I feel stuck when I struggle with stories that don’t make sense on first reading. Over time, I’ve made peace with the fact that it takes an awful lot of studying, patience and prayer to bring to light the importance of so many of its stories and lessons.

In his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Eugene Peterson writes:
“No literature is more realistic and honest in facing the harsh facts of life than the Bible. At no time is there the faintest suggestion that the life of faith exempts us from difficulties. On every page of the Bible there is recognition that faith encounters troubles.”

As a painter, I struggle against static interpretations of landscapes, trying to put movement in them. In a similar way, as I read, I challenge myself to remember that God’s written word is not filled with static renditions or irrelevant stories; it is infused with movement and life.

“The Bible shows us God present and active in and among living, breathing human beings, the same kind and sort of men and women that we are. Imagination is the capacity we have of crossing boundaries of space and time, with all our senses intact, and entering into other God-revealed conversations and actions, finding ourselves at home…” ~Peterson (p.205)

I look through my Bible with the “footprints” I left behind as I moved through its pages – coffee stains, highlighting, margin writing, scraps of paper. Lying open in my hands, I see pages of faith encountering troubles. I see in it paths from previous readings that give evidence of my own reaching for life applications and supplications. With gratitude, I view the neon-highlighted, triple-underlined, joyous messages of hope and promise that have sustained me and have settled into my heart’s home.

It is an ongoing, committed movement in partnership with the Holy Spirit that allows God’s message to come alive and breathe new understanding, prodding us to continue, as Peterson says, “learning, following and growing.”

“They are not monuments, but footprints.
A monument only says, ‘At least I got this far,’
while a footprint says,

‘This is where I was when I moved again.’”
~William Faulkner