“Why, Soitenly!”

I love to read. At one time, I had well over 2,000 books on my shelves … not a large library by most preacher’s standards, but more books than I’d ever owned. When we moved from Long Beach, I got rid of about 90% of them.

But I still love to read. Ordered a couple of books yesterday … just to keep what’s left of the gray matter somewhat stimulated by thought and wonder.

Last week I was given a book, “The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.” I’m only a few pages into it and must admit the author, A. J. Jacobs, is a good writer and an amusing one. I know the point of the book is to basically make fun of the writings we not only hold dear, but guide our lives. To some degree.

Here are some excerpts from chapter 1:

I can’t do anything without fear I’m breaking a biblical law. Before I so much as inhale or exhale, I have to run through a long mental checklist of the rules.

It begins when I open my closet to get dressed. The Bible forbids men to wear women’s clothing (Deuteronomy 22:5), so that comfortable Dickinson College sweatshirt is off-limits. It was originally my wife’s.

The Bible says to avoid wearing cloths made of mixed fibers (Leviticus 19:19), so I have to mothball my poly-cotton Esquire magazine T-shirt.

And loafers? Am I allowed to wear leather? I go to the living room, click on my PowerBook and open my Biblical Rules File. I scroll down to the ones about animals. Pigskin and snakeskin are questionable, but it looks like regular old cow leather is permissible.

But wait — am I even allowed to use the computer? The Bible, as you might have guessed, doesn’t address the issue specifically, so I give it a tentative yes. Maybe sometime down the road I could try stone tablets.

He later goes to Mail Boxes Etc. to have six copies made of the 10 Commandments to post around the house as a memory device, only to find himself behind a woman who takes far too long to have copies made of hundreds of pages … on the only working copy machine in the place! After running through verses regarding anger, patience, and smiling, he makes it to the counter and give the cashier a dollar . . .

She scoops my thirty-eight cents of change from the register and holds it out for me to take.

“Could you, uh, put the change on the counter?” I ask.

She glares at me. I’m not supposed to touch a woman–more on that later–so I simply trying to avoid unnecessary finger-to-finger contact.

“I have a cold,” I say. “I don’t want to give it to you.”

A complete lie. In trying to avoid one sin, I committed another.

What’s scary is that I’ve been there. Not to his degree, but obsessing over trying to keep all the rules rather than loving the One who kept them on my behalf, and being motivated by God’s love rather than my fear of failure to keep a rule.

The lady who gave me the book also gave us a bunch of homemade cookies, including the absolute best chocolate cookies I’ve ever put in my mouth, so I figure the least I can do (and I have committed my life to doing the least I can do) is to read the book. Having engulfed the cookies!