Know-Love-Obey God

High Calling Blogs Book Club:
The Right to Write:
An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life,
by Julia Cameron
Visit High Calling Blogs on May 10, when Laura Boggess will lead our discussion (and share links to other posts) on this week’s chapters.

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Charles (my husband and our Children’s Sunday School Superintendent) proposed a through-the-Bible teaching schedule so that, if children are in our church’s Sunday School from grades 1 through 6, they will have gone through the entire Bible.

A woman was having a debate of sorts with him. “But it’s so important that our kids learn doctrine. Why should a teacher spend a whole year covering First and Second Kings when they could be teaching salvation by grace and not works, or the deity of Christ, or that all are sinners in need of a Savior, or . . .”

If the Bible contained only general truths, general statements of doctrine, my hunger for God’s Word would have diminished long ago. Though our current Book Club selection is on writing, it also gives insights on knowing God through Bible reading.

Writing is making choices, and the choices we make can be generic, which will cost us our reader’s faith, or specific, which will gain our reader’s trust. Detail allows us to communicate precisely what we mean.

- Cameron, pp. 53-54

Thank God, I know from the Bible that the widow who housed Elisha provided a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp in his room. I love knowing that when Jesus cleared the merchants from the temple, He used a whip that He made Himself. I love knowing that there were exactly 153 stinky fish in the disciples’ net that didn’t break, and that the mercy seat was two and a half cubits long. I love knowing what Isaac asked his papa on his way up to be sacrificed.

Cameron opens her twelfth chapter, “I believe in specificity.” I do, too, not only in writing, but in Bible reading. She goes on:

Writing is about living. It is about specificity. Writing is about seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, touching.

- Cameron, p. 52

This is how I love to read His Word, God’s specific, detailed Word to me, for me—that which my ears can hear, my eyes can see, my hands touch.

Cameron also says:

For me, part of the ability to be specific has to do with writing to a specific someone, someone who “gets you.” I know that writers are often told not to think about their audience, but I think that advice can be difficult to use. . . . Better to let the audience be someone real—a lover, a best friend . . .

And so with Bible reading. Most certainly, no one “gets me” more thoroughly than God, the Writer. And I as the reader am certainly His real audience. His is my greatest lover, my best friend.

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Related:
Behold the Beauty (Part One)
Bible Reading: The Details
Food-Love