My mother’s worn Bible
Hello, I’m Tiffany, your resident town hermit. Welcome to my fellowship—a haven where you’re free to talk about taboo subjects you can’t anywhere else. Learn more about The Untangling here, or subscribe to never miss a post.
I was 8 or 9 years old when I learned that life wasn’t fair.
My dad had been home for a couple years since entering remission after a six-years-long struggle against an aggressive form of leukemia. Parents and church members praised Jesus for his healing power and said this was surely proof of God’s existence.
Then, a childhood friend died from neuroblastoma at only ten years old after years of treatment.
I still remember our families gathering after her death, and my godsister telling me that this little girl had told her mom she could see angels, just before she died. But no one could tell me why my dad’s healing was proof of God’s presence when a child died from a different kind of cancer. They said she was now with God.
The dissonance between God sparing one person and letting another live has always preyed on my mind, especially as others died over the years. Why did God healing one mean he existed, but when he didn’t, it still meant he existed?
None of the adults explained death or suffering to us. Neither western Christians (specifically evangelicals) nor East Asians are well equipped to handle grief, let alone walk children through it.
All I could think was, where was God to let a child my age die?
There’s a vivid image in my mind of my mom sitting in bed with her open Bible on her lap, commentaries and notes spread across the sheets. She spent hours every day studying this book. It brought her solace and answers to a life torn apart by early loss, unconditional love from a Father to one who’d lost hers too young, acceptance where from her family she only faced rejection for her physical disability.
By the time I was old enough to understand the “grown-up” Bible, I started crawling into my mom’s bed to listen to her teach and point out its truths to me. Her own Bible was filled with her handwritten notes in the margins, highlighted passages, tabs. She was so knowledgeable from her personal studies and attending seminary, I asked her complex theological questions, to which she could usually give some explanation. She taught me how to close-read, starting with the Bible.
I learned to crave God’s word at my mother’s knee.
“As humans, we cannot help trying to collect knowledge, that is our occupation. Yet we know so little. I am weary of any dogmatism that becomes a tool to bludgeon the unsure.”
—Liz Charlotte Grant, Knock at the Sky
But as I grew older and read more widely, that craving became complicated by troubling questions the text itself raised.
Perhaps like many who have wrestled with Christianity, one of the hurdles has been the holy text itself: the Bible. To be honest, I have had less of a problem with the Bible itself than how those who claimed to know it tended to apply it, or as Liz Charlotte Grant puts it in the quote above, “as a tool to bludgeon the unsure.”
But the truth is, the Bible does have what many in modern society would call “problematic” themes. Inconsistencies, inaccuracies, not to mention the deeply disturbing portrayals of God and His followers: genocide, child sacrifice, slavery, not to mention its promises of condemnation for any who don’t follow its path.
Sometimes a deeper reading in context can explain away some of these, and the fact is that veracity is near-impossible with such an ancient text. But not always.
Even so, I have never been able to relinquish the Bible. Or rather, it has never relinquished its hold on me. One could argue that is a result of my ingrained and brainwashed upbringing. Maybe. But there is something alive when I engage with the text—something transcendent I can’t explain away. While the skeptics could say this is a sad blend of wishful thinking and childhood conditioning, I still believe this book contains God.
But. But. Oh, is it a painful book. Especially when, as in my opening quote by Liz Charlotte Grant, the Bible has indeed been used by so many to abuse and control.
In Knock at the Sky, Grant brings to the forefront the question of inerrancy, a word which means the Bible is without error. Every word in our modern Bible is absolute truth. The problem is, we have a difficult time agreeing on which English translation is actually the correct one (let alone another language). They are all subject to the biases and whims of the translators, as Katherine Bushnell points out in God’s Word to Women, “When we speak of the Bible as inspired, infallible, and inviolable, we do not refer to our English version, or any mere version, but to the original text.”
Denominations split over disagreements in interpretation. We’ve all seen it happen, sometimes hearing it from our own pastors. Reading the Bible “accurately” can be such a minefield. Faced with these inconsistencies even between English translations, I have found the best principle for Bible-reading in a simple children’s version:
“God wrote, ‘I love you’ … And God wrote it into words, too, and wrote it in a book called “the Bible. … No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book of heroes. The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure.”
—Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible
It took me 25 years to understand this concept.
For most of my life, I’d heard, “Do this because Jesus said so,” but that wasn’t enough—precisely because it’s not enough.
Then a switch flipped when I finally realised, “Jesus loves you and that’s why you will want to do it.”
I was sitting at my small Ikea dining table with my church mentor a few months into my marriage, when this happened. We met every Thursday morning for breakfast and Bible study. We ate fresh berries as, through thought-provoking questions and gentle prodding, she led me to understand where motivation for what I’d deemed Christian obligations was supposed to come from. Not from a sense of obligation or “should,” but from a outpouring of reciprocal love after understanding God’s love.
What does this have to do with the Bible?
Everything.
Because when I no longer perceived the “heroes” of the Bible as heroes, I was free to see them as who they were: the flawed, often horrible people they were, through whom God still chose to speak.
Like when Abraham and Sarah abused their Egyptian slave, Hagar, and twice sent her out into the desert to die.
Like when Moses murdered a man then ran away for decades.
Like when David stole his loyal soldier’s wife and had him murdered.
Like when Gideon tested God by asking for signs, not once, but twice.
Why didn’t God care about the people they wronged?
According to my sense of justice, these people shouldn’t be part of God’s divine plan or his legacy, let alone be allowed to commune with him directly. But then, should I be? Should anyone?
In the end, I still don’t have an answer for why children suffer or die.
What I do have from the Bible is an assurance of love. I began to read even the difficult passages through the lens of a God who suffers with us, from a framework of more trust. And I think I finally understand why my mom loves her Bible so much, which is now so worn it’s falling apart.
“We all know how heart involvement leads to suffering. The more you love someone, the more that person’s grief and pain becomes yours. And so even in the first chapters of Genesis, we see God is suffering because of our suffering, because of the misery of the world.”
Because only when I read from the source can I find a compassionate God that’s different from the one that had been shown to me from the rigid, rule-following institutions throughout my childhood and younger years. I saw a God who loved those society rejected, loved those who fucked up beyond repair. I saw a Jesus who disregarded the inflexibility of the law to touch the disgusting lepers just to heal them, who ate with the ones the high-and-mightys looked down upon, who gave dignity to women when they had none back then.
I remembered this was a God I wanted to follow.
“God takes the side of the pursued: the one in danger, the younger, the weaker, victimized. These are the chosen of God.” —Liz Charlotte Grant
With Love,
About Me: I’m Tiffany, a literary fiction, fantasy, and memoir author. My writing has been published by The Cultivation Project and Renewal Missions. I’ve been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023. Order my books here or here.