Dry Bones

Books populate these shelves, dry bones with stories and histories, words languishing in aging bindings that once engaged interested eyes. Within those bindings are the truths the writers wished to share, the window on their world each hoped would enter yours and enlighten you. Interspersed on the shelves are pictures, mementos, and remembrances purchased in some gift store, reminders of a trip you took or time shared with a friend. A singular book was your friend at one time, was once alive but now silenced by the placing on the shelf until it lives through you to another.

For a time, when this book found your interest, when your interest was keen to discover, this book basked in your attention thinking itself to be the most important thing to you. The book captured your visual field, found space in your thought, showed you something you either did not know or discovered again in a new way. You read it because curiosity got the better of you, maybe the best of you, or maybe, despite the best of you.

You read the book not with an interest in diagramming sentences or a desire to rearrange the syntax but to find some place within you to be affirmed by the meaning or improved by it. You cherished the time you held it in your hand. Lifted from the pages was something you wished to share—an opinion, a discovery, a truth. Parts merged into a whole, words into a story, something tangible not just touching you but you touching and holding it.

Yet, beneath the treasure or the irritation the chapters and paragraphs and words gifted you, those sentences rose from the dry bed of some grammar instruction textbook. You did not hold the book to diagram the sentences, but the diagram lies there, prostrate by rule, underlying the writer’s intent to lift from the construction his meaning. Those dry diagrammed bones seeped into your subconscious to lie there like some time-release pill doing its job as the body’s need arises.

This is how scripture lives in you. A book brimming with truth and stories replete with metaphor and parallelism but also with participles and infinitives and prepositions, those little words and phrases, the connective tissue of language that give rise to meaning.

Reading the Bible is like a treasure hunt. You hover your metal detector above the ground until the signal sounds. Hearing it, you have found your spot. You take your shovel and dig. You dig until you find something. When you find it, you hold onto it, cherish it, share it, preserve it for another day.

In scripture, the pages yield those treasures—metaphors and images. The signal marking the spot are those little situated words (bones)—to, yet, but, by, with—changing direction signifying meaning, superfluous but not insignificant. Pay attention to them. Each is there for a purpose, to point the way, to make you pause to consider their placement and meaning, to hint to you there may be more than one way of reading them.

Dig deep. You might find a bone.