Somebody Else Underlined It First

It came to her in a carrier bag with a hairbrush and a pair of glasses, which she has thought about a great deal since.

The Bible is not in good condition. The spine has gone and there is a rubber band round the whole thing, which was her grandmother's solution to most problems, and the back cover has come away and been mended with tape twice.

It is full of pencil.

Underlinings, mostly. A few dates in margins, four or five initials next to verses, and one place, in Isaiah, where a whole passage has been bracketed in a slightly shaky line and there is nothing written next to it at all.

She has had it eleven months.

And here is what she has noticed about the way she reads it, which she does not entirely like.

She goes where the pencil went. She turns to the passages that are marked and she reads them and she thinks about a woman in a chair by a gas fire, and it is warm and it is genuinely good and she would not give it up.

But she is reading her grandmother's reading.

She has not once made a mark in it. She keeps a pen away from it deliberately. When she found herself, in February, wanting to underline something in Habakkuk, she got a sticky note and put that in instead, and even that felt slightly rude, and she took it out again a fortnight later.

She is handling it. That is the word she got to eventually. It came to her as a word and she is handling it as an object.

One generation shall praise Thy works to another

Sit down at the table with the rubber band off, because there is a line in the psalms about how this is supposed to work and the direction of it is the whole point.

One generation shall praise Thy works to another, and shall declare Thy mighty acts.Psalm 145:4

One generation to another.

That is a chain, and it is moving. Nothing in that line is being preserved. Nobody is putting anything behind glass. One generation praises to the next, and the next one praises on, and the whole picture is a handover in motion rather than a collection being cared for.

Hear this at the kitchen table. You have not been given an heirloom, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture describes a chain passing forward rather than a treasure being kept, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moved on a woman in a chair by a gas fire and is now moving on a woman at a kitchen table with the same book open.

Now let me name what the sticky note was, because that fortnight is the whole of this.

You wanted to mark Habakkuk. Something in that passage got you and you reached for a pen and then you did not use it, and you found a way to record the moment that could be undone, and then you undid it.

That is reverence, and reverence is good, and reverence has been quietly telling you that your reading is a visit and hers was the real one.

Hear this too, and let it come off. You are not a visitor in that book, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts each generation in the position of declaring to the next rather than admiring the last, and the Spirit of God who underlined that shaky bracket in Isaiah through an old woman's hand is at work in the thing that stopped you in Habakkuk in February.

And now the bracket in Isaiah with nothing written next to it, because I think about that one and you do too.

She marked it and did not explain it. There is no note, no date, no initial. Whatever that was, it went with her.

You will never know. And here is the thing: she almost certainly did not mark it for you. She marked it because the Holy Spirit got her with a written line on some ordinary afternoon, and the fact that you are looking at it now is a by product of a woman reading a book for herself.

That is what the written word is inviting you into. Not custody of her marks. The same activity, in your own hand, for your own reasons, with the Holy Spirit doing to you what He did to her, which will one day be somebody else's shaky bracket that they cannot account for.