Page 40 of Candy Cane Dreams
"I don't know if I've ever made homemade bread before."
"I personally love sourdough, but I gave all my starter away, and I need to make some more. This is just regular yeast bread."
"Sourdough bread sounds good too." She wanted to do all of those things, but it was an awful lot for a person to do and still work a full-time job. Plus, she was working a little extra to pay for her living place; she really didn't have time to bake bread, although that seemed like such a soul-soothing job.
"I really appreciate you coming out. I know this is a little out of your way."
"It was worth it to step through the door and smell all those delicious smells and just feel the atmosphere here. You make it feel like a home."
"I think it's God that makes a home, although I suppose I know a lot of people who claim to be Christians, and you don't feel that peace and comfort when you walk into their house."
"No," Kate agreed, wondering how people felt when they walked into her home.
They chatted for a bit more before Marjorie settled herself on a stool beside Kate.
They talked about the festival, and Kate laid out all the things that had been happening. She had specifically called everyone who was involved to get the latest updates, so that Marjorie didn't miss a thing.
She was pretty sure that Marjorie appreciated it, because the lady loved to be involved in things.
"You know, I expected you to be a little bit more down. But you're not bitter; you're not angry; you don't seem frustrated... you just seem happy." Kate pushed the papers aside, and Marjorie, with her hands in the bread dough, looked up in surprise.
"Because I am having some physical difficulties?"
"Yeah. Someone like you, who's used to running around everywhere and doing whatever you want, to be laid up, to be held back, especially this time of year. I thought I would see you more flustered or upset or something. I don't know."
Marjorie stopped for a moment, looking off into the distance, as though gathering her thoughts.
"Well, sometimes God has a tendency to test you on things that you think you have a handle on, so I don't want you to think that I know everything. But I think the more you get to knowGod, the closer you are to Him, the more you're willing to let yourself and your own agenda go. And the more content you are with what you have and what you've been given, whether that's material possessions or your lot in life, so to speak. The things that you can't do anything about, even if you wanted to, like your health, and even, to a certain extent, your family."
Kate nodded. That made sense. She couldn't change her parents; she just had to be happy with the parents that God gave her and accept them for what they were and try to love them no matter what. That made sense.
"But how do you know God? How do you get closer to Him?" She paused for a moment. "I want to be like that. I want to be the kind of person who lives my Christian talk, but I don't know how."
Marjorie's brows lifted, and then her eyes narrowed. Kate liked the fact that she wasn't just zipping off a quick, random answer, but she seemed to really be thinking about Kate's question.
"You have to read your Bible. You have to do it on a daily basis. And not just a verse, not just a quick 'I did my reading for the day,' but immerse yourself in it. When you wash your hands, you don't just take two drops of water and say that's enough. No, you run the water over in large quantities, so that you're sure you get them clean. That's what you do with the Bible—you dig into it in large quantities, so that you're sure to get enough, because it washes your soul clean. It washes your insides, cleans the bad stuff out, kind of acts like a filter."
"A lot? What do you mean by a lot?"
"Well, in my opinion, a Christian should definitely be reading their Bible through. Whether it's in a year or in two years or in three years, I don't know, but you should be reading the entire thing. God gave it all to us for a reason."
"But there are whole chapters that I don't even begin to understand. Like Isaiah. It goes on and on forever, and I have no clue what he's even talking about." Kate lifted her hands and then allowed them to drop back down on the counter.
But Marjorie just laughed. "That's me when I first started reading. I didn't understand half of what I was reading. But the fact of the matter is, you're in the Bible, you're reading it. Eventually it will make sense to you. You pray, and you ask God for wisdom, and sometimes you can go to commentaries or online and look up YouTube channels, but that's the other thing you need to do—talk to God about it. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you. If you're a Christian, the Holy Spirit is inside of you. But the Holy Spirit can't show you without you at least reading for yourself. It's not like He's going to drop the knowledge into your head. You have to go after it. And so much of the Bible instructs on the Bible. So if you're only reading, say, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which are easier, and the rest of the New Testament, which is definitely easier than the Old Testament, you're missing things that you need in order to put the pieces together. You need to read the whole thing; you need to read a lot of it; you need to read it often. You need to have a daily time where you're talking to God, reading the Bible, and absorbing it." Marjorie paused. "That's not to say that you shouldn't meditate on one or two verses."
"Is that what you do?"
"Well, I've been doing this for a while, so don't think that you're going to just start being perfect overnight. Not that I'm perfect by any stretch," she said, slapping the bread around and then forming it into a ball. "But what I do is, I'm on a schedule to read my Bible through in a year. So I read that first. And then I pray, and sometimes I pray before I read, just to ask God to show me what He wants me to learn. I'll take notes, copy out verses—it's not a quick process. I take at least a half an hour,and sometimes even double that. And then I have verses that I'm memorizing. Those are the verses that I think about, kind of chew on, work on throughout the day. Those are the verses that I'm putting into my memory. Because the Bible says I need to hide His word in my heart so that I won't sin against Him. God obviously wants us to memorize the Bible. So I work a little day after day. As I get older, it's gotten a little bit harder, but it's also true that the more you do it, the better you get at it. Like anything else."
Marjorie gave her a small smile. "Does that answer your question?"
"Yeah, it really does. But I don't know where to start."
"I do think there's a place for Christian books and Christian teachings and all of that. And you definitely want to be in church. You learn a lot from church, but you need to make sure that the pastor is opening up the Bible and teaching directly from it. Expository teaching is best, but if he gives a sermon on Sunday morning and does expository teaching on Sunday night, you're getting both. And that's good too."
"So you do think that reading good books on the Bible is okay?"
"Absolutely. But the more that you're in the Bible, the more you can look at those books and go, 'Oh, I don't agree with that,' or 'I think they've got it wrong here,' or 'They said this, but they didn't back that up with the Bible, and I don't think that's right.'"
