His Handwriting in the Margin

It is falling apart, and there is tape on the spine that his father put there himself in about 1988.

Soft leather gone the color of a saddle. The first eleven pages of Genesis are loose. There is a coffee ring on Deuteronomy and a pressed something on Ruth that nobody has ever identified.

And the pencil.

His father wrote in it constantly, in a hand that got worse over about forty years, mostly single words and dates. There is a 1974 beside one verse in Job with nothing else, and a no in the margin of a page in Romans that his son has thought about for eleven years and still cannot account for. There is one place, in the Psalms, where he has underlined four words and written this one beside them.

His father has been gone eleven years.

He reads it. Not exclusively, he has a newer one for reading properly, and there is a phone with an app on it that he uses in the truck. But the old one is on the arm of the chair and about three evenings a week he has it open.

And here is what has bothered him, on and off, for most of those eleven years.

He does not know how much of what he feels when he opens it is God and how much is his father.

He has never said that out loud. It sounds like a thing a man should not need to ask. And there was a Sunday, about four years ago, when the preacher said something offhand about people who worship a book, and it was not aimed anywhere near him and he took it home anyway and did not open the old one for about a month.

A lamp is a thing you look by, not at

Let me settle the frightened part first, because it has been carrying that Sunday for four years.

Nothing about a man who loves his father's marked copy is idolatry, and you know that when you are not tired. Nobody in that congregation was talking about you. And a question you have never said out loud has a way of growing in the dark that it never manages in daylight.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as reassurance: what that book is for is written into how Scripture describes itself, and it is not a thing to be stared at. That is not my kind reading of eleven years of unease, it is what stands written in the hundred and nineteenth Psalm, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired that line has been in a farmhouse front room three evenings a week with a lamp on.

Read the image the psalm chooses for itself.

Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.Psalm 119:105

A lamp.

Nobody looks at a lamp. A lamp is the least stared-at object in a house: you look by it, at the floor, at the step, at the thing you were about to trip over. If you find yourself looking directly into one, something has gone wrong and it is usually that the light has gone out.

That is what Scripture says about itself, and it settles the whole question you have been carrying. This is yours right now rather than pending a better answer on a Sunday: the book is a lamp and you have been using it as one, because the written word describes itself that way and the Spirit of God is the one who has been lighting your path with it three evenings a week.

Now let me answer the actual question, the one you have never said out loud, because it deserves better than being talked around.

How much of it is God and how much is your father?

You will never separate those, and here is the thing nobody told you: you are not supposed to. Nothing written asks a man to sort his affections into columns, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been working through both of them for eleven years. Your father is one of the things that lamp has lit. Forty years of a man's attention, in pencil, in a hand that got worse, is not interference in the light. It is some of what the light fell on and it is part of what you can see by it now.

This one, written beside four underlined words in the Psalms, is not competing with the four words. It is a man in a room somewhere, at a moment you were not present for, being reached by them, and it is the only evidence you will ever have of that moment.

And the guard, because it is the whole point of this category: through, not at. This article will not tell you what to do with that book or any other object in that house. What is written puts God at the end of the line and the lamp along the way, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man's attention traveling rather than stopping at leather and tape.