Words on the Word

I am a bibliophile.

I love books more than I love shoes. I can stay in a bookstore forever. I hate to buy one book of a series; I feel compelled to buy them all so they can all stay together. I love the leather-bound gold-edged editions with the ribbon bookmarkers sewed into the binding. I love my grandmother's books behind the glass case in her secretary that now sits in my living room. I love the Dr. Seuss books that my children and I read over and over and over and over...... I love the paperbacks I pick up at the grocery store that pile up in stacks all over the house. I love to see boxes from Amazon sitting on the porch when I get home from work.

But it's not just the physical books. It's the words - the language of the text. I've been collecting words since I was in college. There's a book into which I copy excerpts from books, quotes from different people, and poems that catch my eye and sometimes my ear. I have a hard time reading A Tale of Two Cities because I keep reading the first paragraph over - not because I'm not following it, but because I love the sound of it so much.

This is only a small part of the kind of love we are supposed to have for God's Word. We're supposed to love it so much that we put it in our hearts. We shouldn't have to make an effort at memorization because we should be spending enough time with it that we just know it.

But how precious is God's Word to us? Is our only exposure to the Holy Writ when we are at church? How grateful are we to live in a country where we have technology and wealth that make having copies of the scripture easy or do we take that for granted?

Pray this week for our Christian brothers and sisters who live in countries where they do not have the freedom to read. Pray that we can be more like them and learn to hide God's Word in our hearts.

anything but typical