Not a Hallmark Movie

After reading the book of Job in his march through the Bible, our youngest grandson announced to his mother that it was just like a Hallmark movie,  "In the end everything works out good."  Never in all these years of reading the Bible and reading commentaries about the Bible have I ever heard Job likened to a Hallmark movie.   So many of us who have been reading the holy book for a long time have lost the ability to read the Scripture with fresh eyes, eyes that have never searched those holy pages, and in the process lost the ability to see as a child.

When we know the ending of the story, or when we have read a passage so many times it is all but memorized, it is easy to hurry on through what the Word might be saying to us.  What we sometimes forget is that those stories in the sacred book are not Hallmark movie plots, but the Holy Spirit's way of enabling us to hear a Word from God for the present moment of our life.  It is also the Holy Spirit's way of opening our eyes to see the things of the Spirit which are impossible to see with the eyes given to us at birth. 

So much gets lost by hurried reading, or reading that fails to pay attention to the familiar.  Every familiar thing around us is different when we see it.  If we stand under the shade of a tree that has blessed us long before we started counting blessings, or if we behold a lily that look like a hundred others that we have seen, it is likely we will see that today the familiar is not what we saw yesterday.  It is no different with the written Word of God.  The familiar Word we read today is not the same Word we read yesterday or last year because it is a living Word given so that we might hear fresh and new Words from the Almighty.