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Stories from the Verse
Con Verse Lea
Chapter 67: Hastings 249
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Beam 149
What had she done?
She had committed herself to teaching Bible to a huge class of barely literate students. She had made herself effectively pastor of a huge congregation. She was now responsible to hold church.
She had never done anything quite like that before, really.
She could probably get out of it. After all, Tommy was the only person she told, so only Tommy would know if she didn’t do it.
But then, she remembered, she had done this before--sort of. She had taught classes in Bible over a century ago, to Derek, and Starson, and Grarg, and the others in that other post-apocalyptic world. The classes were smaller, and she had a blackboard--or maybe it was a whiteboard, she couldn’t remember--but she did teach Bible to groups of people. That they were smaller groups was a minor detail. She had done this; she could do it again. Of course, that was more like part of the course curriculum in their school. This would be more like church--but not that much more like church, because she didn’t expect to have music. But the differences weren’t all that great.
So she’d better figure out what she was going to teach.
She opened her Bible to John, and noticed immediately that it had oversized margins--space in which to write notes. That was good. Although she had paper, she did not have a notebook or file in which to sort and keep anything.
As she began to read, in the beginning was the word, words which she had used against the forces of evil many times, she recalled that these echoed the opening words of Genesis, in the beginning God, and that in that first chapter God had spoken the world into existence, brought it to be through speech. Now John was connecting Jesus to that spoken word, telling us that Jesus was involved in the creation of the world. That was important. She should make a note.
She realized she didn’t have a pen. Nor a pencil. She had used a quill before. In other worlds, she just borrowed them when she needed them. Perhaps stupidly she had provided herself with pads of paper when she was teaching school, but didn’t pack a pen or pencil among her things. Of course, Chicker always had one handy, and there were others in the building where they stayed. She had simply overlooked putting one in her gear.
Well, she was just going to have to remember. Glancing over a few verses in Genesis, and noticing that this particular Bible had five cloth bookmarks, she placed one of those on the first page of Genesis and returned to John. She wasn’t sure how much she would cover on the first day, but she was going to cover what she could.
Actually, she wasn’t going to get very far. She was going to have to teach these people how to find books in the Bible. Well, one step at a time. She could do this.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #470: Verser Turnings. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
