She Read It Once and Saw It

Priya was not doing it as a spiritual exercise. She was doing it because she said she would.

They had been friends about four years and it had come up twice, and the second time Priya said, in the way she says most things, fine, send me one and I will read it, but I am not doing a course.

So Ife sent her the shortest Gospel and thought about it more than she let on.

Three weeks later, at a table by a window, Priya said: he keeps touching people he is not supposed to touch.

And Ife said something agreeable and then went quiet, and then went home, and then sat in the car outside her own house for about twenty minutes.

Because she has been in this since she was fourteen. She is thirty-five. She has read that Gospel, at a conservative estimate, more than thirty times.

And she has never once noticed that.

Not never known it. She could have told you, if you had asked her directly, that there is a leper in chapter one. She could have quoted the line. She has heard four sermons on that passage that she can specifically remember.

But she has never once been struck by it. Nobody had ever put it that way to her, in that order, as the thing that stands out if you simply read the book from the front.

And her friend, who is not a Christian and was not looking for anything and read it in about three sittings, got it in three weeks.

That was in March.

And the thing Ife has been carrying since, which she has said to nobody, is not envy and it is not guilt.

It is a question. She wants to know what else is in there, in plain sight, that twenty-one years of familiarity has made invisible to her. And she does not know how you would go about finding out, because you cannot un-know a book.

And you may have had a moment like that. Someone from outside, saying something obvious, that landed like new information.

John says out loud what the book was written to do

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since March and it was never yours.

You have not been locked out of your own Bible. You never were. Scripture stops near the end of one Gospel and states, in plain terms, why it was written down at all and what it is meant to produce, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a first reading or a fresh pair of eyes, who makes a page land on somebody. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and it has been in the car with you since March.

Now hear it, and hear that it is the author telling you his purpose.

But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.John 20:31

These are written that you may believe.

He tells you the point. Which is a remarkable thing for a book to do, and it means the book is not a puzzle with a solution held elsewhere. It was assembled to do something to a reader, and the author says so.

And notice the mechanism. Written, so that reading it produces believing, so that believing produces life. Three steps, and the first one is that somebody reads it.

That is what it does and it is still doing it. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land, and He has never once reserved that for people encountering it for the first time.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says twenty-one years were a waste. They were not. You know that book, and what your friend saw in three weeks she saw because somebody like you handed it to her and then did not stand over her while she read it.

And nothing here says a first reading is purer. It is not. Priya missed a hundred things and will tell you so herself in a year, and Scripture gives depth to people who stay with it, and the ones who have stayed longest are not further from it.

The point is narrower and it is about the filter, and Scripture says the writing was done in order to work on a reader, and His Spirit is the one who does that work on the thirtieth pass as readily as the first.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You are not envious of your friend and you were right about that.

What you actually felt in the car was hunger, and you have not been able to name it because you assumed a person twenty-one years in should be past hungry. His Spirit is the one who made you hungry in that car, and He does not hand that to people He has finished with.