Lynn Jones: What have you been reading
By Lynn Jones
As students return to school this year, one of the time-honored assignments by teachers is to ask the students to tell what they did during the summer. When my wife Danielle welcomed back to the library a class of second graders one year, she did a variation of that assignment. She asked the second graders to tell about a book that they had read during the summer. In making the assignment, she had to be careful to limit it to that. She specifically said, “Now don’t tell us about your vacation, one of your pets, or your birthday party.” Those were their three favorite things to tell about.
So, having limited them to more literary pursuits, she waited for their responses. By the slowness of their reactions, she could tell that they had not spent much of the summer with their noses in books. Finally, one little girl volunteered that she had read Junie B. Jones and the Stinky, Smelly Bus. It’s a book about a little girl who hates to go to kindergarten on the big, stinky, smelly school bus. Another girl said that she had read the Dr. Seuss book, “The Cat in the Hat.”
As Danielle heaped generous affirmation on these literary pursuits, she could tell that one little boy was searching through his memory to try to come up with something literary that he had done over the summer. Finally, he raised his hand and said, “Well, I’ve been trying to read the Bible some this summer.” That gave several others an idea, and it turned out that almost the entire class had spent most of the summer reading the Bible.
You’ve got to admire students like that. Compared to The Cat in the Hat, and Junie B. Jones and the Stinky, Smelly Bus, the Bible comes off looking pretty good. Actually, the Bible comes off looking pretty good when compared to any book.
There’s never been another book like the Bible. I have read that in the Louvre in Paris there are three and one-half miles of books on science that are outdated. The books of the Bible were written from about 1200 BC through about 100 AD. That means that the oldest books of the Bible are now about 3200 years old and the newest books are about 1900 years old. The Bible, however, is not obsolete. It continues to speak to us and inform us in ways that no other book in the world does.
I don’t know what you’ve been doing this summer, but I hope that you’ve spent some time reading. Specifically, I hope that you have spent some time reading the greatest book in the world—the Bible. And I hope that you have not only been reading it, but that you have also been translating it into action in your life.
Lynn Jones is a retired pastor who lives in Oxford. He does supply preaching for churches in his area and often serves as an interim pastor. Jones is also an author, has written two books and writes a weekly newspaper column. He may be contacted at: kljones45@yahoo.com.
