When my son was around six years old he told me he was an excellent bowler. Being very aware that he was no such thing, I asked how he knew he could bowl. “Oh,” he replied, “I’ve done it on the Wii.” I’m sure you can imagine his expression the first time he picked up a five-pound bowling ball and walked with those slick rental shoes on the wood paneling. The weight of the ball, the gutters that seemed to magnetically attract a spare, the impossibly long alley – it all added up to a pretty sketchy score. 

If only everything in real life was as easy as it is in our imaginations! I got my own education on the *actual* difficulty of the Bible when I was assigned to teach a Bible study on the book of Hebrews. As a girl who had grown up in church, attended a Christian high school and was the grandchild of missionaries, I thought it would be easy. “Oh,” I thought, “I’ve been doing this Christian thing all my life.”

My first evening of class prep at a Starbucks, I sat with the book of Hebrews open on my lap, and within three chapters I was crying. Not because of the beauty or some super-spiritual epiphany. No, I was crying because I didn’t understand a thing it was saying. 

Before, when reading the Bible, I would read until I found something kinda fun or meaningful, take that apart a bit, and then call it good. But as I envisioned a class full of bright and insightful adults looking at me, standing up front with a whiteboard and a lesson plan, I knew I was not up to the task. 

Something cute and a little clever was not going to work. I was faced with having to read for REAL understanding. And there was no room for holes in my understanding because I needed to take that understanding and translate it back to a classroom. 

Looking at the first chapters in the book of Hebrews I was incredibly frustrated. I didn’t know what it said. I always thought that I had been prepared with my family history and all those years sitting in a pew. But it was crystal clear that day that I only had a surface knowledge of theological concepts. I was so disillusioned by my own shallowness. 

That evening at Starbucks was the first time I picked up the real bowling ball of scripture and tried to hurl it at some pins. And as the ball ran straight into the gutters, I found some much-needed humility. Over the next year I developed a healthy respect for the weight of scripture, I learned to value the discernment of scholars and the whisper of the Holy Spirit, and I discovered that the Bible is absolutely beautiful Sacred Literature. 

I think most of us don’t want to get to the end of our lives and realize that we have been playing bowling in a video game when there was an actual real bowling alley. I think we want to have a faith that is deep and wide. I think we want our grandkids to come to us with their questions about Jesus because they know that we KNOW Him. And I’m pretty sure, deep down, most of us know that we won’t get that from skimming Instagram for quote cards.

{part two}