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Stories from the Verse
Con Verse Lea
Chapter 69: Takano 78
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Beam 150
The week passed in a slow blur--hunting, fishing, cooking, washing up, sleeping, reading, and doing it all again. She was getting a bit better at it all, but other than the reading it wasn’t terribly interesting.
Then the day came--Tommy was thinking of it as Sunday, although she had no idea what day of the week it actually was. Lauren had sent word the night before that there would be a mid-morning gathering of everyone at her campsite, and they should bring Bibles. They came. She stood on a log, and began to speak.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I shared these words from the Bible last week, and we’re going to begin with them this time. They are found in a section, or book, of the Bible, called the Gospel of John, and I will show you how to find it soon.”
As she held up her Bible, she apparently realized that these people had learned to read on computer screens, and never seen a book before. This was going to be more challenging than expected.
“The Bible is a book, but it’s also a collection of books written by many people over a very long time. It tells the story of humanity, of God’s dealing with people, from the beginning of history. Each of those books tells a different part of the story. We’re going to start with a part that’s near the end of the story, but to do that we have to learn how to find it. So hold your Bible in your left hand like this, by the solid edge we call the binding or spine, such that whatever is written on the front, what we call the cover, is upright.”
She waited a moment as people did this.
“Now, carefully lift the cover, so the book is open, like this,” which she demonstrated. “You should now be looking at sheets of paper, called pages, most of which have writing on them. If you turn them one at a time, you should come to a page which says contents, or something like that, at the top, and near the top has the word Genesis. That should be the first of a list of the books contained, probably with numbers after them. Those numbers are the page on which that book begins, so you can find a book by looking it up here and going to that page by following the numbers.
“But I don’t do it that way. As a little girl I learned all the names of the books of the Bible, and the order in which they were included. One way I learned them is that I learned a song, and I’m going to teach you that song now. The words, or most of them, are that list that you should now have in front of you, so follow along as I sing: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy,” and she continued singing with only a few extra words through the book of Psalms, and started what Tommy recognized was a second verse, that ran from Proverbs to Malachi, and then a third verse that managed to cram in the entire New Testament.
“O.K.,” Lauren said, “now that you know the melody and have the words in front of you, try to sing it with me.” And she repeated the song. She repeated it a couple times, and then said, “We’ll sing that again before we’re done, and will sing it every week until you’ve all learned it and can sing it yourself. For now, I want you to turn another page, maybe a few pages, until you get to the page that says Genesis at the top. You see, when John said that Jesus was the Word, in the beginning with God, He was remembering what was written here, and to understand what He wrote, we need to understand what he saw here.”
As the people were turning pages, Lauren stepped down and took a sip from a cup of water she had placed near her perch. Then she stepped back up and continued.
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 #472: Versers Vanish. 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:
