On Getting Lost in the Bible

It’s probably happened to you before. You move to a new area and you’re trying to learn your way around your new community or perhaps you've recently passed your driving test and received your license and you’re noticing different ways to get around your town for the first time. As you are learning how to get around your community you know that there have been times that you've gotten lost. If you have a map in your car, you may consult the map, you notice street names, highway names or some identifiable route or road and you find it on your map and you are able to see where you are and where you would like to go. Perhaps you turn the GPS on in your telephone and wait for it to find you and begin giving directions, helping you find your way out of a state of being lost. Sometimes we stop and get directions or more than likely we keep traveling, hoping you’ll recognize a building, a fence-line, a familiar street name or another landmark such as trees, lakes or ponds.

Once again, I found myself in places I didn't think I was planning to go. Once again I call upon map skills or check my watch to see the time of day and looking for the sun so I can find the direction I need to be heading. I review routes with Google maps; check with folks for the landmarks that I should look for or what side of the road the house is on. I program my GPS and I am off and sometimes I get to the place I am going with minimal trouble and other times even my GPS cannot find where I am going and I am among the lost. The thing about learning any new community is that we are never really lost, we’re just exploring new ways to get around, but until we start our drive and set out on our journey, we’ll never learn the way and even if we get lost, we can add another route to the same destination at another time.

Getting lost is not always comfortable. The bigger the city, the more wooded the area or the more traffic there is, we find that in our state of being lost becomes less desirable.  Regardless, it is a part of learning and becoming so familiar with your area that when an unexpected detour comes along, you’ll know another way to get around. Getting lost on the way to someone’s house is the way we learn. We don’t fail just because we got lost along the way. No, that is how we learn. Just as we can expect to get lost when learning a community, I would like to suggest that we need to get lost in the Bible. With anxious souls and gloved hands we've gingerly and fearfully handle our sacred scriptures and in doing so, we've created an idol out of bound paper and have added to the illiteracy of scripture. Instead of getting lost in the Bible we've allowed others to interpret the scripture for us and have corporately lamented that we really don’t know anything about our Bible. Like someone who has lived all their life in the same house, they take the same route to the grocery store that their parents took when they were young. When we become too satisfied with the familiar, we rob ourselves of the newness and the beauty of another way.

When we take the same route through the Bible that has been interpreted to us by someone else for all of our lives and when we leave the Bible reading and interpretation to someone else, we relegate the scripture to a painful death of ignorance and irrelevance. The scripture is so much more than the accumulated knowledge of pastors, theologians, teachers, and scholars. What makes the scripture meaningful is not what others may say about the scripture, but what we may discover when we allow ourselves to question, to doubt, to explore, to experience, or to study. If the Bible falls on the ground you will not have to answer to God’s judgment. If you write in your Bibles or even throw old warn Bible away, you will not go to Hell.

 The scriptures are words,poetry  thoughts, stories, songs, and accounts of thousands of years of history, but the pages between the leather covers is not the ending of God’s creative work among humanity. God continues to use each one of us to bring new life to God’s amazing work among us. God’s words are not bound by the covers of the book, but continue to be written in the lives and examples of faithful men and women who dare to get lost in the Bible. It is when we get lost in the scripture that we are able to discover “new wine in old wine-skins” or discover living water that quenches our thirst and gives us the desire and the curiosity to keep exploring without judgment or retribution. The only truth in the Holy Scripture is what is meaningful to you and what empowers you to set out on a journey to make the scripture relevant to you. Getting lost in the Bible is the first step in finding your way through this life. So, don’t worry, just get lost in the Bible and the Holy Spirit will reveal to you what you need to know.