When we were serving in a remote area of the world, dear Husband spent some time with a veteran missionary who told him stories of his life.  Many years ago, when this missionary first came to the interior of our island, he had a dilemma.  The tribes he had contact with had no written language.  How could they ever read the Scriptures?  So he devised a plan to help them learn the Bible.  He asked each tribal village to send him one promising young man.  He taught those 13 teenagers ten Bible stories over the course of four days.   Then he sent them home to tell their village the Bible stories for three days.  When they returned to him, he taught them 10 more stories and they again went home and told their village the stories.  This continued.  Eventually, the missionary developed an alphabet and for the first time the people had their language in writing.  Then he made a primer to teach young people to read.  And he began the long job of translating the Scriptures into their language.  The first young people to learn to read were taught to teach others and those taught others.  Over time more and more tribal people were able to read.  And over time they got portion after portion of the Scriptures in their own mother tongue.  This took 35 years of his life.  Can you imagine their joy when at last the entire Bible was finished, printed, and delivered so that they could read the entire book?!

Here is one example of a people group receiving their Bibles. https://www.maf-uk.org/news/maf-fly-over-2500-bibles-to-papuas-yali-tribe-55-years-after-maf-first-discovered-them

In the Western world, we’re privileged to have so many tools to help us get God’s Word.  We have books, movies, reading plans for reading through the Bible in a year.  We can freely join with others in small group Bible studies.  We can have open conversations with anyone we please about the Bible.  I’ve signed up to receive daily emails from preachers or organizations that give me quick reads from Scripture with some comments as well as more in depth articles.  When researching a topic, the tool I love to use is https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/   It offers the Bible in many translations as well as a concordance that enables me to look up verses with a keyword.  I use it every week to write this blog.  For years I wrote out a verse or two every day that had special meaning for me from my reading that day.  Writing it helped reinforce the idea in my brain.  Memorizing is harder at my age so I’m grateful that church teachers motivated me to memorize Scripture when I was young.  I can remember reciting verses to my mother.  Memorized verses are priceless when you encounter something in your day and immediately a verse pops into your head that helps you in that situation.  You may need a warning, an encouragement, wisdom or courage.  And in that moment God’s Spirit brings a verse to mind.  Meditating on Scripture (mulling it over in my mind) throughout the day keeps my mind in a good place.  I often look at a beautiful scene and think, “If it’s this lovely now in a broken world, what will it be like when God remakes everything?”  And I try to recall what the Bible says about the new heavens and the new earth.

With all the resources available to us, are we making use of them?  It reminds me of an old story of a young man in Europe who worked hard to save enough money to buy a ticket to America.  In those days this trip on a ship took 2-3 weeks.  He packed his suitcase including some food.  Each day the other passengers went to the dining room.  The young man could smell the aromas and watched the others go while he stayed behind eating the last of his food.  Finally, he was so hungry he asked how much a meal would cost.  To his shock, the answer was, “The meals are included in the price of your ticket.”  Good food was available to him, but he hadn’t taken advantage of it.  We can act just as foolishly as the young man.  God’s Word is available to us, but we don’t take advantage of it.  Our souls are starving in the presence of holy food.

What we truly value controls how we spend our time.  There are certainly ranges in the amount of time we have control of.  I remember many years as a young mother of six children there was precious little time that I had choices about.  It was hard to do anything more than my job of parent, teacher, and missionary.  The same goes for those who are working long hours, or are caregiving long hours, or are serving long hours.  Some of us have more say about how we spend our time than others.  Now I have much more time that I can make choices about.  I have more time to study the Bible.  For instance, I usually spend hours each week reading Scripture in order to write this blog.  I discuss it with dear Husband.  I think about it for days as I write this blog.  I pray about it.  Due to a myriad of technical difficulties with the back end of the blog, I wasn’t able to publish last week.  Instead of continuing to write, I took a week off.  My first week off since November of 2015 when I started writing this blog.  No sin in doing that.  But I have a confession to make.  I slacked off in studying the Scriptures as usual because there was no deadline, no pressure, no accountability.  Fortunately for me I have other spiritual food in place; Husband reads part/all of a chapter in the Bible to me each morning after breakfast and we talk about it.  We go to church and get rich Bible teaching every Sunday.  But I wasn’t reading and meditating for myself. 

Then my next door neighbor, a young woman in love with Jesus, posted a photo on Facebook of her open Bible and commented enthusiastically about what she had been studying.  I was ashamed.  And I was famished in my soul.  I knew I needed nourishment so Husband and I watched not one, but two episodes of “The Chosen”, a video series on the life of Jesus.  Then I read in the book of Matthew the part of Jesus’ life the film had covered.  I felt life flow back into my soul.  Just as a baby needs milk, so we need God’s Word to nourish our souls.  We can’t flourish and grow without it.    

 “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation,  now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.”  1 Peter 2:2-3