By Billy Hughey
I stumbled across it the other day, lying forgotten in a desk drawer. There it was, all scuffed-up and dog-eared, its worn pages full of bright, smudged color. And I had to smile as the memories came flooding back, of the brand-new 18-year-old Christian, dazed at the sight of the Bible’s 66 sprawling books, its huge, incomprehensible depths.
I’d never have predicted it (hey, who would have?), but when a teenage kid, desperate to understand Scripture by any means necessary, began color-coding his Bible with a handful of cheap felt-tipped pens, he was setting out on the journey of his life.
In 1970, when I was 18, I accepted Christ as my Savior at the El Reno (Oklahoma) First Baptist Church, and suddenly I felt a great hunger for God’s Word. Even though my mother was a devout Christian, I had rarely ever cracked open a Bible. Still, I’d always been a competitive, high-energy kid, and I was taking my new faith seriously. So in addition to the King James Version, I had a Living Bible and Good News for Modern Man. But between Genesis and Revelation lay so much sheer, forbidding volume—words, words, more words. What seemed like acres and acres of grim gray pages was enough to intimidate—no, numb—a beginner Christian like me. God’s truth lay in those pages, but how was I to extract it and make it part of my new life?
My mother had always had a special reverence for the Bible. Once, when I was younger, I left an empty Coke glass on a Bible. Momma snatched it up. “Billy, the Bible is not a coaster! It’s the Word of God! Please treat it with respect.” She also frowned on writing in the Bible or bending corners to mark a page.
So, in spite of the fact that God was little more than a name to me then, I grew up with a respect for his book. It wasn’t like a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or a history book. It wasn’t even a book about God. It was the very Word of God. But I still never read it.
And now I wanted to read it. I wanted to digest its meanings, take them to heart. I saw my born-again friends’ Bibles, all crowded with notes and cross-references, covers falling off from hard use. All due respect to Momma, but to study God’s Word, you needed to mark it up. Otherwise it would merely be a religious artifact. Untouchable. And uncomprehended. The Bible had to be more than that.
I’ve always had a penchant for words. As a boy, I was forever entering, and winning, vocabulary-building contests. And I was a nut for organization. Baseball cards would constantly get shuffled into ideal teams. The other kids may have dreamed of becoming big-league stars; I was going to grow up to be a baseball statistician!