Bible Given, Bibles Received

Today, I was packing books at the District office for the good men from McMurry to come pick up on the 22nd---I will be gone Monday thru Friday next week to the Festival of Homiletics in Nashville, so my time is short. As I got through packing Wesley's journals, and assorted other Wesley books, I reached for the next shelf down which held several of my bibles. I have packed those bibles (some of them) ten times (maybe 11 or 12) in moves. Today I was struck by the inscriptions in the front page of each and I realized we have had our own little Gideon Society right in the Hale/Cox family giving and receiving bibles right and left. Here are more about the bibles in this picture taken this afternoon, numbered from left to right:

Bible 1) The Rainbow Bible with color illustrations and a cool cross metal bookmark. This was given to me at Christmas by my parents in 1962--I was eight. KJV of course (Not in the picture is the tiny white "bible" somebody gave me when I was born. ---that would have qualified as my first Bible I think)

Bible 2) The white genuine leather Bible I received at Christmas from my parents in 1965--presumably I needed a more grown up and prettier Bible by then. It looks like someone has used it a lot---that someone was me. KJV of course

Bible 3) The Living Bible New Testament which was my brother Sam's gift to me upon my graduation from eighth grade in 1968. This was the very first of the Living Bible bibles to come out and man, he was really hip giving it to me, graduating me on to creative renderings of stories I had heard in the KJV. I now was growing into teenagerdom, (in my high school days anyway) using a PARAPHRASE instead of a TRANSLATION! It brought out my biblical wild-child.

Bible 4) The Jerusalem Bible that I bought myself when I was a freshman in college. This was about the same time I saw a traveling company do Godspell at SIU which was one of those mountain top experiences--remember it was 1973. Somewhere I had been to a study or heard a sermon from a Catholic priest around Carbondale someplace who used this translation and I really liked it. It may have been Hugh Muldoon??? I used it for several years and still use it for reference (and reverence).

Bible 5) A beautiful small tan Bible I received in 1977 when I was ordained as a deacon, as some of us oldies were before the new (new?) ordination process. I was ordained by Bishop Leroy Hodapp in the Southern Illinois conference. And he inscribed it. It really looks beat up too---I used it for preaching quite a bit early on and I dropped it a big water puddle one time when I was getting out of the car and it got soaked and the pages still show it.

Bible 6) This Bible was my maternal grandmother Granny Hale's last Bible, given to her in 1984 when she was eighty by one of her grandsons. It is full of notes on scripture and notes from the preacher's sermon. She was Gospel Assembly and had very long white hair and lived until she was 97. She was widowed during the depression with four children, the oldest, my mother, in high school. Anyway, she loved the scripture; she also, as most children of her generation did, memorized poetry at school. And she wrote on the inscription page, which was really a place to record a marriage, these words:

My heart will keep the courage of the quest, And hope the road's last turn will be the best.

--From Henry Van Dyke's poem Life.

Granny actually made a change from the original poem. She changed "hope" to "know."

Bible 7) An NIV version that I gave my mother Christmas 1988. She was in lay speaking training at that time and I thought she would like it. I was gifted back with it in 2000 when she died.

And there are more Bibles we all gave each other that are in assorted place. I just hope that when I am gone, that Cana and Caleb will both enjoy and thank God for this Bible giving thing that has gone on in the family. And will still be reading their own as well.