Well Said: "I feasted on the meat of the Bible for four years."

A little more from Andrew Peterson's piece, The Integrated Imagination, which I quoted from yesterday. Just because it resonates so well with my own experience. We feel his delight in the Bible coming through these words. Truly the Word is honey t the tongue!

The Bible became fascinating for the first time since I had read Revelation at church camp to see how imminent was the apocalypse in order to gauge my remaining party time. Now I read it because it felt alive. ... And you know what? It worked. During the first few weeks of Bible college the story of the Old Testament lit up my imagination with stories of battle, espionage, love triangles, deception, failure, heroism, and the promise of redemption; mine was an imagination well-prepared for the invasion of the Gospel story. The soil had been fertilized in my youth with a hundred tales that had taken root and grown but had born no fruit; those old stories withered, then decayed and composted, readying the ground for the life-giving seeds that were coming.

I feasted on the meat of the Bible for four years. ... I no longer felt that awful lack of purpose, which is, I suppose, a lack of hope. Now there were songs to be written. There were concerts to play. I wanted to tell people this story that had changed me, and through the lens of all my newfound hope, the world and every person I met seemed to shimmer with God’s presence. I read commentaries, I read every class syllabus, I read the Bible, I read papers. I was eating meat, meat, meat, and more meat.