This picture signifies so much for me. Yes, it’s a Bible, but to me, it’s so much more. I put my Bible of many, many years on the shelf. I’ll be honest, it was not just falling apart, it was in pieces, Hebrews 11 was gone. Parts of Jeremiah were in a baggie in my room. Christmas came this year and I received this Bible. I couldn’t be more thrilled, not just because it’s a lovely gift, but also who gave it to me. My kid.
It was time to lay aside the old. Stop looking back at all the things I had written in my Bible and remembering the past. I know the past. I will keep what God has done in my past in my heart, I have small monuments in my house to what he has done. How he has moved. The Bible, however, needed to be put on a shelf. I had been given a beautiful gift.
I have learned. I have grown. I have changed. I am not the same person who wrote all over Psalm 91 in black pen. UGH. WHY DID I DO THAT? I don’t respond to Jeremiah 31 the same way. I feel differently about Rahab. I love the story of Noah, but see it in a very different way then before.
8 Love never fails. But prophecies will be
New Testament for Everyone (NTE) Scripture quotations from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011.
abolished; tongues will stop; and knowledge, too,
be done away. 9 We know, you see, in part;
we prophesy in part; 10 but, with perfection,
the partial is abolished. 11 As a child
I spoke, and thought, and reasoned like a child;
when I grew up, I threw off childish ways.
12 For at the moment all that we can see
are puzzling reflections in a mirror;
then, face to face. I know in part, for now;
but then I’ll know completely, through and through,
even as I’m completely known. 13 So, now,
faith, hope, and love remain, these three; and, of them,
love is the greatest. I Corinthians 13: 8-13
It is good to look forward, we don’t live in the past. We don’t live as ghosts haunted by our past. God has taken our past and forgiven it. So I throw off the old. I thank God for the learning. And I move towards him in the new.
I strive towards faith, hope and love. I strive towards him.
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