Our Journey

Give me the grace to make your Word my home, that I know you more clearly and serve you more faithfully ever more. Amen.  — A Guide to Prayer for All Who Seek God, Reuben Job

This week’s petition in A Guide to Prayer captures my desire and the reality for so many here in Malawi.  The Word of God is their home.  They know the Bible forward and backward, verse-by-verse.  Their depth of knowledge is not the result of Sunday School drills but a deep familiarity and fondness akin to one’s familiarity within one’s own home.  Reading the Bible and coming to know scripture is like knowing every squeaky board in one’s wood floor or just how to turn the nob at the sink to stop the dripping or knowing just where to sit to feel the evening breeze.  Scripture is not a task or an obligation, it is a dwelling place.

My comments are generalities, I know.  Every Christian in Malawi does not have this same depth of knowledge and love of the Bible.  But as I observe and participate in this new culture, I experience a different approach to scripture.  Christians have learned to make the Word their home in a way that I only experienced in rare individuals at home.

The “sword drills” I’ve learned about from friends who grew up in the South are described very differently than the family Bible studies and Bible quizzes that happen here in Malawi.  Each story told, each verse memorized, each detail revealed is a brick that builds their houses, houses that will shelter them for the adversity that is sure to come and threaten their lives, their safety and their faith.  There is a love of scripture and dependence on the Word of God that is startling to my Western sensibilities.  Even using the word “sensibilities” belies my bias toward utility and practicality.

I long to make the Word my home.  To wander through each room, appreciating the details, remembering each person who has entered and the memories they have left there.  I long to reach for Bible verses as easily as I reach for plates and cups in the cupboard.  I want to see God revealed as clearly as the sun breaking through when I pull back the curtains each morning.  And to rest quietly in scripture, enjoying the same stillness and peace of a house at night with children dreaming in their beds and my husband by my side.

I hope for the day that the Word of God is my refuge and strength in the same way that my home is the place I start from and the place to which I always return.

Amen.