{"id":20955,"date":"2020-08-22T09:42:41","date_gmt":"2020-08-22T14:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/?p=20955"},"modified":"2020-08-22T09:44:55","modified_gmt":"2020-08-22T14:44:55","slug":"i-encourage-you-to-write-in-your-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/i-encourage-you-to-write-in-your-bible\/","title":{"rendered":"I encourage you to write in your Bible"},"content":{"rendered":"

“This shall be written for the generation to come; and the people who shall be created shall praise the Lord\u201d (Psalm 102:18).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Please go to the front of your Bible and write in it.<\/p>\n

Start by putting your own name.<\/p>\n

Often, when I pick up the Bibles of friends to see what they have written in them, I\u2019m chagrined to see they don\u2019t even have their names.<\/p>\n

Write in your Bible, friend.\u00a0Please.<\/p>\n

At Christmas 1973, my aunt Eren gave to her mother, my wonderful grandmother Bessie Lowery McKeever, a Bible.\u00a0 Grandma died in 1982, but not before marking up that Bible.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

I now own it.\u00a0 It is a treasure beyond price.<\/p>\n

This morning, I read something I had never seen before, that made the tears flow.\u00a0 (I was looking up the text above, and Grandma\u2019s Bible was handy.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the margin beside Psalm 103:17, Grandma had written \u201cOne of Papa\u2019s favorite verses.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon those that fear him, and his righteousness unto children\u2019s children.<\/em><\/p>\n

I never knew Grandpa Lowery, her father.\u00a0 I have been told he was a preacher of the Word, and\u00a0a Baptist at that. And, that as a little girl, Grandma would accompany him as he went out to preach. Other than that, I know nothing of him.\u00a0 Thanks to Grandma\u2019s notes in the front of tis Bible, I\u00a0have his name:\u00a0 George Marion Lowery. And his wife, my great-grandmother, was Sarah Jane Blocker, whose birthdate is listed as January 1, 1852.\u00a0 (Grandma Bessie was born in 1895, was married in 1910, and became a mother the first time in 1912 when my dad Carl arrived, and for the twelfth time with the birth of Georgelle in 1936, six months after being widowed.)<\/p>\n

In his life, my dad gave me two Bibles. The first came\u00a0in 1948 when he asked me to \u201ccome go with me,\u201d and we walked the railroad tracks up to Sophia, West Virginia. Inside the variety store he asked a clerk to \u201cShow us your Bibles.\u201d He let me pick out one, a black zippered beauty that I read every night.\u00a0\u00a0Then, sometime\u00a0in the last few years of his life, he gave me Grandma\u2019s Bible alongwith some interesting instructions.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t tell people you\u2019ve got it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSome\u201d in the family\u2013presumably a sibling or two\u2013would want the Bible if they knew it existed.\u00a0 So, I was to keep it but say nothing about it.\u00a0 I assume it\u2019s safe to do so now.\u00a0 It\u2019s a treasure.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m in favor of people writing in their Bibles.<\/p>\n

I started to preach the funeral of optometrist Dr. J. E. Gooch, a deacon in our church who had fought under General George Patton in the Second World War.\u00a0\u00a0The Third Army had liberated Hitler\u2019s death camps and Dr. Gooch had scores of photographs to document it.<\/p>\n

Just before the service began, Dr. Gooch\u2019s son approached me. \u201cPastor, I thought you\u2019d like to see this.\u201d He handed me his dad\u2019s Bible.<\/p>\n

In the front, on one of those white pages found in most Bibles, this faithful servant of the Lord had written:\u00a0 \u201cI came to know Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior on Friday, September 3, 1948, in Shady Oaks Baptist Church, Route 3, Brookhaven, Mississippi.\u00a0 I was baptized the next Sunday afternoon in Shady Pond, and I have been serving the Lord all the years since.\u201d\u00a0 (This is not what it said, but close enough\u00a0for our purposes here.)<\/em><\/p>\n

I read that in the service. It was more comforting than anything I had to say.<\/p>\n

Ever since that moment, I\u2019ve been urging people to \u201cWrite your testimony in your Bible.\u201d\u00a0 It will outlive you.\u00a0 It will be there to bless your descendants who will one day treasure your Bible.<\/p>\n

After my father-in-law died and we were going through his house, making decisions on what to keep, what to pass on to family, and what to toss, I found a Bible I had more-or-less given him in 1964.\u00a0 (I\u2019m smiling at the memory.)<\/p>\n

Pop had become enamored of the notes in my Scofield Bible, which I had purchased at a discount at the local Baptist Book Store because of a defect.\u00a0 (Some Scripture portion had been printed twice.)\u00a0\u00a0 One day when Margaret and I were newly married, Pop said, \u201cJoe, would you give me this Bible?\u201d\u00a0 So, I did.<\/p>\n

And now, forty years later, in a bookcase, here was that Bible. It had been repaired with duct tape.\u00a0 And inside was a page of notes\u00a0in Pop\u2019s handwriting.\u00a0 But not what I might have wished or expected.<\/p>\n

He had listed every gun he owned with its serial numbers and history.<\/p>\n

I suppose they were his treasures and what better place to store them than in the Holy Book.<\/p>\n

Grandma also kept clippings\u00a0in her Bible, some of which I am just now discovering.\u00a0 Like the 1980 article in the Jasper, Alabama \u201cDaily Mountain Eagle\u201d where the columnist had interviewed her about her early life. There\u2019s a lovely photo of Grandma surrounded by her five sons and seven daughters. They\u2019re all there, and decked out in their finest. It\u2019s a wonderful keepsake. (And for those who read our Facebook postings, right in the middle sits my Uncle Ed. The famous and notorious Edwyn McKeever, he of the malaprop, married to Opal, truly one of a kind.)<\/p>\n

I write in my Bibles.\u00a0 Each of my eight grandchildren has received a Bible from me, and possibly will be given more (since I still have six or eight Bibles in my study at the house).\u00a0 More than once, I have read the Bible through in a year and marked it up as I went, then presented it to a grandchild. Once, I bought identical Bibles and marked up two in one year, then presented them to twins Abby and Erin.<\/p>\n

So, please. Write in your Bible.<\/p>\n

Start with a) your name in the front of your Bible, and then b) your testimony on one of the white pages.\u00a0 Then, read it with a highlighter or a fine-point pen handy. Make notes in the margin.<\/p>\n

Make this a keepsake.<\/p>\n

You may end up blessing descendants whom you will not see until they arrive in Heaven.\u00a0 And wouldn\u2019t it be great to know your testimony helped them make it there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“This shall be written for the generation to come; and the people who shall be created shall praise the Lord\u201d (Psalm 102:18). Please go to the front of your Bible and write in it. Start by putting your own name. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scriptures","category-senior-adults"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20955"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20974,"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20955\/revisions\/20974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/joemckeever.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}