One of the best practices in RenewalWorks is to embed scripture in everything. The vesting room has a sign on the door about robing priests with righteousness, but the true embedding is in the heart. I find passages that I memorized back in Sunday School at The Anderson Baptist Church serve well and it comes back to from the recesses of my mind.

A passage that haunts my mind are the words of our Lord found in the…

Gospel of John 9:4,“I must work the works of him that sent me, whilst it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.”

Those words give my work a sense of urgency, not anxiety, but a focused energy. A year ago, I rose early to walk in my neighborhood. At four a.m. there are few folk around as I moved through the pools of light cast by the street lamps. I listened to the entire Church History and Martyrs of Palestine by Eusebius, some 35 hours or so. Several sections comprise long lists of Christians martyred via the most hideous tortures. One section lodged in my psyche.  The authorities devised unique and awful punishments for belief in Jesus. For a time Christians suffered one eye gouged out, the foot opposite mangled, and a sentence to the copper mines. Soon a host of Christians was gathered there.

The presence of so many Christians, including several bishops, led to the growth of a Christian community with “houses for church assemblies,” 63 appointing its own bishop, 64 and, because they were denied written scriptures, listening to recitation by a blind Egyptian who knew them by heart. 65 It appears that those who became too old or infirm to work in the mines were allowed to live on, fasting and praying, in a separate settlement near the mines and this evidently became a special focus of the Christian community, led by the Bishop Silvanus and the blind “reader” John. 66 Despite a presumably high mortality rate, the community was periodically reinforced as new batches of Christians were sent there; in 306– 7, most arrivals appear to have been from Palestine and Gaza; in 308– 9 we hear of two groups from Egypt, one comprising 97 men, women, and children,,, —

Mattingly, David J. Imperialism, Power, and Identity:
Experiencing the Roman Empire – (Miriam S. Balmuth,
Lectures in Ancient History and Archaeology) (p. 189).
Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

One story, a note in one of the ancient manuscripts has caught in my imagination,

“Many of them were Egyptians. The Greek adds in this place the account of one John, who had learned the Scriptures so thoroughly by heart, that Eusebius states, that when he saw him standing up and repeating portions of the Scripture to the congregation, he supposed he had been reading till he drew near, and discovered that he was quite blind.

Can you see it?  A crowd of cripples, surrounding an old man with a ring of snow white hair round his bald head. Listening as if their very life depends on it, (cause it does) the company of the walking wounded hear the depths of the words”Let not your heart be trouble, believe in God, believe also in me. In my father’s house are many rooms”  or “Be not afraid, I have overcome the world.”  Blind eyes shut he sees the Good News of God in Christ.  Seeing eyes look beyond the damaged present to the world to come.

I join that gathering from time to time in my mind.  At the edge I stand, unobserved,  listening to the words of life from one who knows the price of faith. What if he had not embedded the Bible in his soul?  What about me?  If all I had was my memory how much scripture would I have?