When There's Nothing Else to Do...

Somewhere around the age of nine or ten, I figured out that reading the Bible was one of the best ways to while away time in church. You could get in trouble for doodling, as I often did, or for acting up in one way or another, as I was especially likely to do when I was sitting in the balcony away from adult authority. But if I was sitting next to my mother and happened to open up the Bible and start reading, what was she really going to say? It was hardly a practice she'd want to discourage. And my Bible-reading wasn't entirely just an act: during those long hours in the sanctuary of Capital City Baptist Church in Manila (well, technically Quezon City), during the early 1970s, I discovered the "good parts" of the Bible. And the parts that interested me then remain the ones that interest me now, with just a few additions of books I couldn't really appreciate at eight or ten years old.

I always loved Genesis and the story of Moses, but it gets very, very boring after about the twentieth chapter of Exodus--almost as though you're going through the wilderness with the Israelites. I've since learned that other parts of the Pentateuch contain some really cool stories, but you have to pull these out from among a lot of mind-numbingly tedious passages.

The books from Joshua to Job have long continued to fascinate. Still, I didn't then know how to find the really intriguing details beneath the surface of Nehemiah's deceptively bland-sounding account, or to appreciate the tenderness and sensitivity in the story of Ruth, which at the time I would have dismissed as being a little too girly for me. By contrast, the story of Esther always appealed to me, especially because I got to play the part of Haman, the bad guy, in a fifth-grade play. There was enough action there to offset any girly elements--a great concern for a ten-year-old boy, who hasn't yet become comfortable with confessing the fact that he actually likes girls, and everything about them, a great deal. As a boy, especially at a very young age, I was all about Samson. In fact, my mother used to con me into eating my vegetables because Samson had done so, or so she alleged, but she went too far when she told me that he had gotten strong by eating sayote (I'm not sure of the spelling here), which was sort of like a light-green hybrid of a turnip, parsnip, and squash.

Here I could go off on a tangent about all the fruits and vegetables from the Philippines that few people in North America have ever even heard of, but if I'm going to digress concerning the country where I lived for nine years as a missionary kid, it would be to mention how funny it is to think now that so few public buildings there at that time were air-conditioned. Instead of using air conditioners, the sanctuary was cooled by cross-drafts through windows low and high, the high ones very high to pull out the heated air that would otherwise have gathered along the ceiling. To my eyes then, as you can imagine, those windows up to God made the interior of the church seem as immense as Westminster Abbey. And after looking up at that high ceiling and becoming vaguely aware of words from the pulpit, I would finally go back to hiding myself in the Bible.

Oh, yeah. Back to the Bible, to quote the name of a show with a cheesy theme song that Mom used to listen to on DZAS, a radio station run by Moody Broadcasting. The six books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles contained an overall story that intrigued me endlessly. I especially loved David and his exploits--which, I became convinced years later when writing an ancient history reference series for middle-school kids, provided the substance for the tales of King Arthur. I identified with David, not just because his name is my middle name, but because he started out as a little runt and went on to do great things.

Despite this love for David, though, I couldn't get into the Psalms then, but of course later (especially during army basic training and immediately thereafter) , I found a great deal there. As for Proverbs, that's what I originally started out this post to discuss--how no book intrigued me more. Same with Ecclesiastes, though the interest there came a little later in life, in part because of reading Jack London's The Sea Wolf at age thirteen. Before I was a teenager, the only passage of "The Preacher," as Wolf Larson described the Solomon of Ecclesiastes, I could really wrap my mind around was the "To everything, there is a season" section, subsequently ingrained in popular culture as a result of adult classic radio stations overplaying the Byrds' "Turn! Turn! Turn!" Song of Solomon, of course, was too much for a ten-year-old, but once I was a little more mature....

As for the Prophets who make up the remainder of the Old Testament, I loved some of them then--especially Daniel--and discovered others later. The story of Jonah, as Herman Melville later helped me to appreciate, actually has even more meaning when you're an adult than it does in childhood. On the other hand, as a ten-year-old Jeremiah and his Lamentations appealed to me more than they do now. Maybe by the time you're in your forties, you're just sick of hearing people complain all the time....

I tended to stick to the Old Testament for the most part then, and when I did venture into the New Testament, I focused primarily on the beginning and the end: the Gospels and Revelation. The Gospels have remained a source of fascination, always yielding new wisdom, and as an adult I have come to appreciate the Book of Acts as a series of dramatic episodes that collectively tell a powerful tale. Then there's Revelation, which I read over and over and over, especially in church. Long before the "Left Behind" phenomenon, before the fiction series or any movies (unless of course you count a cheap, badly acted 16-mm film called Thief in the Night, usually shown during Sunday night services), I went through the whole rapture-obsession thing.

Back then, I'd skip over the letters to the seven churches, but now I think they're the best part of Revelation. But as for the other letters that make up the New Testament, for the most part I never could get into them as a kid, and I never have as an adult either, though I've acquired a lot more fondness for the more "spooky" Epistles (the letters of Peter, Jude, and John) that come toward the end. But considering the fact that the Pauline Epistles contain the blueprint for Christianity as a doctrine, some people would regard this as a major gap in my wisdom.

[As I mentioned above, I started out to write something else, but instead found myself discussing the Bible and my childhood reading of it. Fitting it should go this way, since I began this post during church prime time, 11 to 12 on a Sunday morning. Even in periods of my life when I haven't been inclined to observe the kinds of formalities with which I was raised, I've always tended to regard that as a sacred hour. A shout-out here, by the way, to my cousin Beth, who was also raised as a missionary kid in east Asia.]