Shaped

Psalm 119:47 ESV

For I find my delight in your commandments, which I love.

It lays broken on the shelf. Decades past its prime, and decades past usefulness. A forgotten memory by the one who gave it and a sorrowful reminder to the one who received it. It lies broken on my shelf waiting for the day, the day when it can be opened once again. Its story is one that predates my existence and has shaped who I am more fundamentally than any other earthly thing. The Story began in February seventeenth of 1979. That is the day that my mom gave this bible to my father.

I do not know if I have always slept poorly, but for all my memories nights have never been a joy to me. Terrorized by nightmares until I learned the trick of not sleeping soundly. At that point I started waking up with my father. In the old 1890s farmhouse that was now in town, I could hear him go to take his morning shower, and I would wait. I might doze but I would wait. Then I would wrap myself in a blanket and go downstairs to find the chair at the table across from him, watching as my dad prepared for his day. Getting his bottle of Diet Coke ready, having his cigarette, and reading his bible. I did not eat breakfast, I remember no conversations, I remember putting my head on the table and simply watching until he went to work, then going back upstairs and getting a thirty-minute nap before I needed to get up and dressed myself. For many years this was my routine, watching my father.

I don’t know how many red pages were turned each morning. The point is that they were and I saw them. I saw them turned until he was done and he closed the book and zippered it shut. I watched until the binding gave out and the padding between the inside and outside was visible. For Christmas, give him a large bible cover for his small bible, to help preserve its dignity. All the pieces are still there; the covers and the spine, the padding and the zipper. In hope I requested a book for Christmas this year, How to Rebind a Bible: Start to Finish, now I get to find time and space. This little bible, redline RSV edition with a concordance, is THE book that has shaped my life and it is not even mine, and I have never read it, another man did. Another man read it until the spine broke, as his children grew and married, and as his marriage broke.

As surely as afterwork my father would be in his shop working on something, in the morning he would be reading his bible, and so my life was shaped. Yet, my mom left and it was a gift from her. The house was sold, the sandbox in the back, the trees, and the shop, all have another family enjoying them. Yet this has shaped me more. So, I have it, the eldest son whose life was changed by this book. I have other bibles that need new bindings as well. They will be the practice, because I fear doing a bad job on this one more than the rest. When you live with other immortal souls you do not know what will make that memory. When the habits you have will be pressed on them in such a way that they will be shaped by it.

As I prepare to go to the mountains with my eldest son this year, I am ever aware that I don’t know. So, I pray. Let us not be so foolish as to think we are ever in charge. I have three siblings. All of us are different, all of us grew up in the same house, one sits and watches his father read, one watches his father work in the shop, one does this or that. We must pray, for we do not know who is watching what. Those that would say they are out of “that phase” of their life, fail to realize how many watch, and how much is still to be done. Never think you are done shaping the hearts of your brothers and sisters until God calls you to himself. Until that moment, reading your bible in view of children, grandchildren, or nurses, might be all that is needed to change a life.  

Coram Deo