A NEW START

This is my butterfly garden planted by Sandra and added to with some flowers from Carol. I love to see the butterflies they are so gentle and they always catch me by surprise.

Today we are starting our JETLAG Bible study. Believe it or not we have been meeting for over twenty years. Yes, I am not the only slow learner. Actually we have become very close and supportive friends. We certainly do not think alike but we have a lot of laughs. We often even disagree with our study guide which reveals our rebellious spirits. Maybe rebellious is a little strong but we certainly have minds of our own.

We are doing a study called the Bible so we will be reading it all through and through. That is a bit scary isn't it? I got several books out of the library by Karen Armstrong called "The Bible" and "The Case For God". She is called the foremost English-language historian of religion today. She can take a long and complex subject and reduce it to the fundamentals, without oversimplifying.

She explains how this group of wandering nomads finally settled and built a temple and the temple became their place where God lived. This temple was essential to their religion and when they where forced into exile in an alien land they felt God was punishing them.

It would become many, many years before they became people of the book. Some of their history was written in scrolls and it was believe these records would help them restore their own identity and religious beliefs.

The scribes who studied these documents did not regard them as sacrosanct and felt free to add new passages. They had as yet no notion of a sacred text. True, there were many stories in the Middle East about heavenly tablets that had descended miraculously to earth and had imparted secret, divine knowledge.

We even have books like that today that tell us how to be open to the spiritual while living in our daily struggles.

This book we call the Holy Bible is not easy to understand. It often can seem contradictory, incoherent and distressing and yet for me I have found the breath of God, like the butterfly, gently appearing here and there.