But of course there was the Bible, in a class all by itself. This was The Book in our home, and we heard it read every day, usually twice a day. The King James English was as simple and familiar to me, with all its “beholds” and “it came to passes,” as Philadelphia talk (pronounced twawk). The resonance of the Books of Moses, the cadences of the Psalms, the lucidity of the Gospel of John, the soaring rhapsodies of Paul on the love of God, the strange figures of the Book of the Revelation, all sank deeply into my heart and mind. Everything in life, I believed, had meaning as it related to what I knew of The Book.
There were many books in our home by and about people who lived by the Bible. It was in Amy Carmichael*, a missionary to South India, that I found the kind of woman I wanted to be. She was at work for the Lord (an Anglican, she had founded a place for saving little girls from temple prostitution), and she took time in the midst of this to write of her experience as she walked by faith in a place where almost no one shared that faith.
Continued next week . . .
**All That Was Ever Ours, pp. 90-91
*To learn more about Amy Carmichael, we recommend reading Elisabeth Elliot’s biography of her remarkable life, A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael