Back to School

I have the attention span of a squirrel. There's a shelf in Matt's office that contains my inspirational/devotional/religious books, and this shelf is just above the gardening and cook book shelf and just below the travel shelf because I am that way.

I cringe when I look at my devotional shelf. I have read every single book on it ... in part. I start, I get bored, I stop, I repeat. For decades.

There's Jim Martin's The Just Church, which I loved right up until the chapter in which the author explains how a whole church body can seek justice, and then I realized my own church does this well already, so I slid it back next to Richard Foster's Prayer. This book, too, fascinated me until the moment came when I knew I was going to have to actually try some of these prayers, and that sounded scary, so back it went next to a half-finished Beth Moore study.

Squirrel.

I have decided two things:

1. My reading schizophrenia is okay. Let's call it quirky and be done with it.

2. I am going to keep buying, shelving, reading, and re-shelfing devotional books. So there.

Which brings me to The Discovery Study Bible. Here's why I own this book. 

Many years ago, I signed up for a class. I don't remember who taught it, but the subject was an in-depth study of the Psalms. Off I trooped to the introduction, outfitted with a notepad, several pens, and a highlighter.

Alas, when I arrived, I realized I'd left my Bible at home. Oh, heavens. Ill-prepared and ill-equipped even before the class began? No bueno. I hit the bookstore and bought The Discovery Study Bible.

The course was great, and the Bible was great, and afterwards, it went on the shelf and didn't come back down again until recently.  I was getting a little bored with a women's devotional I had gobbled up in the early chapters but was now force-feeding. There I stood in front of the shelf, lips pursed, wondering if I was going to have to resort to Amazon. 

"Huh," I thought. "Time to switch up my Bible, not just my study?" 

Friends, I love it. I open up this thing and get the same whiff of expectation as holding a freshly sharpened pencil on the first day of school. The lessons are short, interesting, and best of all, often end in writing assignments. For example, after studying the Psalms of lament, I wrote one of my own. Me? A writer of a Psalm? Well, now, that hit some happy buttons, even if the poem was a plea.

Here's another interesting lesson. I read this passage from Proverbs 6:9-11:

How long will you lie there, you sluggard?

     When will you get up from your sleep?

A little sleep, a little slumber

     a little folding of the hands to rest --

and poverty will come on you like a bandit

     and scarcity like an armed man.

I learned that ancient Hebrew poets gravitate towards synonyms, repetition, and parallelism to develop an idea, rather than our western preferences for meter and metaphor. That sense of repetition can make reading the poetry seem, well, repetitious. 

But, as the study writers point out, the repetition drives the concept. For example, in the above passage, the first two lines say essentially the same thing, yet use different language to do so: "how long" and "when" are word pairs that ask the same question. The phrases "you lie there" and "your sleep"are also synonymous. (Check out the name-calling tucked right between the two lines. I suspect the writer was yelling at his teen-aged son to get up and mow the lawn.)

Next, some exact repetition of "little" coupled with more synonyms: sleep, slumber, and folding of the hands to rest. The words themselves lull me straight into narcolepsy, and I think, yes, a  nap would be lovely. Perhaps I'll fold my little hands right over a little book while I catch a little shut-eye.

But then? The writer picks up that book and smacks me with it. "What?" he shouts. The very opposite of rest (notice the synonymous pair "poverty" and "scarcity") will be your lot. There's a thief, he says, a bandit, an armed man, who will take everything away from you if you don't get up off your tuches and fight him off.

Yes, I think. That makes sense. No work means no mullah, which eventually results in no roof over my head or food in my tummy. Got it. Thank you, Captain Obvious.

And yet ... as I follow the instructions of the lesson and parse out the parallel lines, new ideas occur to me. First, a sluggard is willfully lazy. We're not talking about one who labors for six days and then pauses on the seventh for reflection and gratitude. No, this chap is the anti-liver, fully disengaged from community. "How long" will this continue? "When" will it end? 

But really? Is a "little" nap such a bad idea, a "little" snooze so dangerous? Solomon sure thinks so.  Scarcity and poverty come in lots of shapes and sizes, none of them good.

I know this because I spent years detached from my own life. The reasons were valid, and the fear was palpable, and all of it was learned at the hands of babies-for-parents leaning too heavily on their own anesthesia of a little of this and a little of that. Close the door, open the book, droop the eyelids, and perhaps the alcoholism and rage will have disappeared when I emerge from the cocoon. 

Emerge I did, often into the arms of workaholism and people-pleasing, the very opposite of Solomon's laziness, but the same resulting scarcity of spirit. Disengaging rendered me invisible to the people around me. Working myself to death made me invisible to myself.

Rest is good. Work is good. I do both aplenty, yet so often, the scale tips too far in one direction or the other. When it does, the clues are blessedly obvious, the onrush of poverty too painful to ignore. 

I'll keep sliding up and down the teeter-totter, sometimes locating the exit ramp, sometimes not. On days when I find community and beauty and my very own truest self, I'll open my hands rather than close them because truth evades my clenched fists. And the other days, the ones where I grasp at everything and find nearly nothing? 

Well. I'll give extra thanks for those days. It is at the very bottom of the pit that the water starts to seep in.