Her First Bible Came From The Wrong Hands

She was nineteen and she had not been raised anywhere near it.

Somebody gave her a Bible. A plain one, nothing fancy, and they wrote something short in the front, and they answered about four hundred questions over the following year without ever once making her feel stupid for asking any of them.

That was the year. She would tell you that plainly. Everything she is now started in that twelve months.

And that person has since been exposed, publicly, for something that was going on at the time.

She has read what came out. She has read it more than once, which she knows is not helping, and there is no version of it that has an innocent explanation in it, and the people who were harmed were real people with names.

So here is where she has ended up, and she has said this to nobody, because saying it to anybody at her church would produce a torrent of reassurance she cannot face.

She has begun to wonder whether her own beginning counts.

Not intellectually. She could argue this correctly on a whiteboard and she knows all the right answers and she does not find them helpful at two in the morning, which is when the actual thought arrives, and the actual thought is: what if the whole thing was something that person did to me.

She still has the Bible. It is in a drawer now rather than by her bed, and she moved it about four months ago, and she remembers moving it and telling herself it was because she has a nicer one.

And she has stopped telling her story. She used to tell it easily, and there was a version that took about ninety seconds, and now when somebody asks how she came to faith she says something vague about a friend at nineteen and changes the subject.

And you have a beginning like that. Somebody brought you in, and they turned out to be something else, and you have quietly begun to wonder whether the door you came through was a real door.

The promise is about the word, not about the messenger

There is a sentence in Isaiah that people usually apply to preaching, and its real force is about where the guarantee sits.

So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.Isaiah 55:11

Read whose word it is and whose purpose it accomplishes.

My word. From my mouth. That which I purpose. The thing for which I sent it.

There is no clause in that sentence about the carrier. Nothing in it is conditional on who was holding the book, or what their life was, or what came out about them nine years later. The guarantee is attached to the word itself and to the One who sent it, which is the only place a guarantee could ever safely be attached.

You received something that was sent by God and its arriving was never conditional on the courier. It is written that His word shall not return to Him empty but shall accomplish that which He purposes (Isaiah 55:11), and it is the Holy Spirit who was the One at work in a nineteen year old asking four hundred questions, which is not a thing any human being has ever been able to arrange for anybody.

Now the two in the morning thought, because it deserves to be looked at rather than argued down.

What if the whole thing was something that person did to me.

Consider what your beginning actually consisted of. It was not an experience somebody produced in you at an event. It was a year of questions and answers. Four hundred of them, by your own count, asked by a nineteen year old who had not been raised anywhere near this and who was checking everything.

That is the least manipulable form of coming to faith there is. You were not swept. You were reading, and asking, and testing, and the thing that convinced you was the answers holding up.

You came in through your own questions and the answers stood on their own, which is exactly what nobody can do to somebody else. Scripture says test everything, hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21), and it is the Holy Spirit who honors that kind of coming, and you did the testing yourself, at nineteen, on your own initiative.

And a word about the reading, because it is part of what is hurting you.

You have read what came out more than once. You said yourself that it is not helping. That is not morbid curiosity; it is a person trying to find the sentence that will settle it, and there is no such sentence in that material and there was never going to be, because that material is about somebody else's life and your question is about your own.

You are looking for your answer in a document that has never contained it. It is written that the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God (Romans 8:16), and neither of those has ever been located in a report about anybody.

And the Bible in the drawer.

You moved it four months ago and told yourself it was because you have a nicer one. You remember doing it, and you remember the reason you gave yourself, which means some part of you knew at the time.

You are allowed to take it out of the drawer, and nothing about doing that touches anybody who was hurt. Scripture says the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever (Isaiah 40:8), and it is His Spirit who has been the constant across everything, including the whole of the year you came in.