I’d guess I was somewhere in the range of 12-14 years old for this one. Out of the blue, I got a letter in the mail from Publisher’s Clearing House or something similar. Whoever it was, it was a sweepstakes business, and the letter implied that I’d be winning a million dollars!
Of course I know years later that this was too good to be true, but back then, in the 1990s when things were simple and I was young (and a million dollars went a lot further than it does in the 2020s), I was completely taken captive by the idea. I set about planning what to do with all that money.
I decided my largest purchase was going to be a house that was for sale in the neighborhood where we lived. It might have even been right next door, I’m not sure. Once I figured that out, I broke out the JC Penney catalogue that came in the mail every year. Remember those? They were bigger than a phone book (hopefully you remember those, too). The catalogue had all kinds of home furnishings. I picked out a living room set with black leather couches, I think. I remember I also wanted to pick up a hot tub for the back yard. I dog-eared a whole lot of that catalogue’s pages. I don’t remember how I mentally got past the problem of being too young to make legal transactions like buying a house, or figuring out taxes, or being too young to even be able to drive a car. All that little stuff would surely get taken care of for someone with money!
I got pretty deep into this whole thing. Eventually my parents had to break it to me: “you’re not winning this money.” I think they showed me the original letter I received, and pointed out the fine print or the way the words for the announcement were chosen very carefully to make me believe I’d already won. Looks like I was going to have to figure out some other way to pay for the latest Michael W. Smith and Steven Curtis Chapman albums.
Hopefully reading from the Bible is a regular occurrence for you. If it’s not, try to make that a habit starting this year. Here’s something to watch out for though. English is not the language the Bible was originally written in. As you can imagine, not every word in the original languages directly translate to English. There’s a reason “lost in translation” is a common saying. Folks have been translating the Bible for quite a long time and they’ve put a lot of thought into this, but sometimes the reasons translators chose particular English words or phrases aren’t evident or explained. That’s where a study Bible can really come in handy. It explains some of those word choices, along with the context of why actions were so meaningful in light of the days’ traditions, and it often links related passages.
While a scripture-only Bible is wonderful, a study Bible typically brings much more understanding and context. In much the same way that I needed to have someone who understood the reality of “you’ve won a million dollars*” explain the asterisk to me, I find it to be enormously helpful to have a study Bible that breaks things down for me or explains it to me in an understandable way so I don’t make my own erroneous assumptions and accidentally sink my beliefs into something that’s simply not true.
Lord, thank You for giving us the written word. Help me find the right translation of the Bible I can readily understand, and the right tools to grasp the significance of what I’m reading. In Your name, Amen.