A couple of months ago, I agreed to attend a November 7 retreat for relational healing. I figured it was a good start for my 31st year alive, as well as a good way to usher in Advent. The retreat turned out to be a better blessing than I expected in terms of the healing that I needed—which wasn’t much, if you consider the depth of the brokenness the other participants had to deal with—but, more than that, it also renewed my desire to return to reading the Bible.
When I was a child, the Bible was a source of wonderful, ever interesting stories. I had Bible Study on Sundays, courtesy of the neighborhood’s resident big-sister-slash-old-maid, where we discussed the lives of biblical characters and then colored bond paper photocopies of their likenesses. On school days, I had a best friend who challenged me into reading the entire Bible, with the promise that we could make a wish after we got past Revelations 22. That was something we did for fun.
It was the era of Superbook and Flying House and the Bible was a book of adventures and its characters could hold their own against the rest of the superheroes I knew. In fact, I remember a game we would play where somebody would mention a superhero and his power, and then somebody else would mention another superhero who could beat that power, and so on. Jesus was always a sure winner—except when some wise guy would say “God” and then a long debate on whether or not you could take the Holy Trinity as separate beings would ensue. Now, that didn’t make me love God or recognize His love for me any less, because, really, to a child, it’s pretty cool when you can say Jesus can bring Superman back from the dead—and he’s totally immune to kryptonite too, because guess who made kryptonite and everything else in the universe, including Superman, for that matter?
I suppose, when you grow older, you get more and more into the seriousness of it all. Religion, whose job it is to nurture your faith, becomes a somber affair. Unfortunately, for some people, myself included, religious practices that used to hold so much meaning start to take on a tedious feel. I stopped reading the Bible regularly as I grew up, only to refer back to it in times I felt the need for God’s word.
Lately, however, biblical stories from childhood have been coming back to me, but I now see them with a deeper understanding. I suppose that’s also what happens when you grow older: stories you previously appreciated only for their narratives become stories that you appreciate because they help you draw meaning from your life.
In the past week, I’ve been thinking of the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac out of obedience to God. It was a story that struck me as a child because I couldn’t imagine a father offering up his child as a sacrifice. Neither could I understand why an all-loving God would ask that of somebody who waited so long to have a son with his wife. While this story did give me a hint of how faith in God’s plan should be bigger than everything else in one’s life, it took years—over twenty, in fact—for me to appreciate its true wisdom.
I see the story of Abraham and Isaac now in the context of my pursuit of true love—a pursuit that’s been colored by years and years of romantic films and love stories. I’ve had a pattern of dictating on God the kind of love story I would like to have. Sometimes, even, I’d find myself asking him for the love of a specific person. Obviously, that led me down a path of frustration many times. Anybody who has ever been “in love” knows how difficult it is to let go of someone when you’ve convinced yourself that that person’s the right one for you.
This is where I can see that faith like that of Abraham’s should step in. I couldn’t really grasp the sacrifice Abraham was making until I thought of the next most important thing in my life: a person I loved. That was my Isaac. If I have faith in God, I should be willing to let go of him.
Good stories have a way of coming back to you, indeed. Then again, the Bible’s not called “the Good Book” for nothing.
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