One Woman. One Bible.

“I don’t know if you knew this or not, but I grew up Catholic until I was in my early twenties,” she said. 

We sat together on a couch, a little boy’s birthday party bustling around us. Kids ran in and out, tracking in grass and water from the yard. A giant, curly-haired dog with wearing a blue bandana sniffed around for cake crumbs at our feet. Coming up empty, he shuffled off in search of something more entertaining.

But I was riveted.

“My mom was really involved in a women’s prayer group, like a Bible study. And when the leader stepped down, they asked her to take up the position. She agreed, and she began to study the Bible.”

“She started to realize that what she’d been taught her whole life and what the Bible said was very different. They were always praying to the saints. They prayed to the saints during the meetings, but it didn’t agree with the Bible. She just couldn’t do it anymore, so she stepped down from the position and told them why. Eighty percent of the women stopped talking to her because she had betrayed her faith.”

The woman next to me had been a Brazilian foreign exchange student at the local high school, then returned to her family in Brazil to finish her college education. Years later, after a long-distance overseas courtship, she married her Iowa high school sweetheart and moved to his farm. That’s when I met her. It was over a dozen years ago, but this was the first time I’d this part of her story. 

Her eyes crinkled for a moment, remembering, and her smile radiated the joy she’d found.

“My mother told us kids. She converted us,” she laughs. 

She laughs, but I am spellbound, in awe of how alive, how sharp, how powerful God’s Word is.

No theology discourse. No sermon series. One woman. One Bible. God’s Word was enough. 

Do I read my Bible like that? Is it my ultimate resource? If I see something God’s Word in that differs with what’s going on in my life, do I immediately accept and adjust my life to align with it? Or do I test it? Question it? Ignore it? Do I even recognize the truth as I read it?

Would I have done what her mother did, and counting the cost, throw off her whole life’s way of thinking, way of living, way of worshipping? Would I have been willing to risk friendships and family and tradition to follow God’s Word? Would I have let God’s Word be reason enough for all of that?

What if she had not? She could have chosen differently. What if she had counted the cost and decided the price was too high? What if she had only secretly agreed with God’s Word but never let it affect her life? She could have acknowledged internally that her way and God’s way differed but continued the same outwardly. She could have kept it to herself. She could have kept her friends, her position, her traditions.

She could have, but she didn’t. And so she was saved. Her whole family was saved. 

I want to read God’s Word like that. I want it to change my life. I want my children to see that it makes a difference. That it’s not just a truth or some truth, but THE TRUTH. I want to freely throw off anything that’s in the way to follow THE TRUTH.

One woman. One Bible. And now one family with children and grandchildren and someday great-grandchildren are living and walking in Truth.

I am a woman with a Bible.What difference will it make in my life? In the lives of my family members? In the lives of my friends and coworkers and relatives? I don't know exactly what it will look like, but I know there will be a difference. Who will be freed because of the truth I know? If I don't share it, no one. Not even me. 

If I don't let THE TRUTH change my life, nothing will change. 

Here's my chance. As one woman with one Bible, my life can be changed. I can be free. I can be used. I can be who God uses to spread truth to my family, my friends, my communities. 

Here's my chance, but I have to take it every day. I have to choose. Either I choose consciously, knowingly, purposefully, or I choose by default. I'm always following something. Will I choose myself and my society - or my Savior and my God? 

Today I will follow THE TRUTH. By the grace of God, I will. One woman. One Bible.