Still on the Contents Page

Dwight went out to the truck because he could not find Habakkuk.

The breakfast is on a Saturday, about fourteen of them, in the back room of a place that does eggs and does not mind a group taking two hours. It is a good thing and Dwight has been going for four years and would tell you it is the best morning of his month.

Somebody said the reference. Not showing off, just said it, the way you do.

And Dwight watched that room find it.

That is what he described to me afterward, and the detail he kept coming back to was the sound. Fourteen people, and a kind of quick riffle, and then everybody still, in about three seconds.

And he was on the contents page.

He is fifty-eight. He has owned that Bible for eleven years and a different one before that. He has been in church since he was thirty-one. And he does not know the order of the books, has never known the order of the books, and has spent twenty-seven years covering for it.

He has a system. He watches which way people's hands go, which tells him roughly where in the block it is. He has learned to keep his own book flat on the table so nobody can see how much he is turning. Once, at a funeral, he found the right place by counting back from a hymn number, which he is quietly proud of and which is also, when you think about it, a heartbreaking thing to be proud of.

So he went out to the truck. He said he needed something out of it. He sat there for four minutes.

I found him in the car park about a week later and asked him straight, because I had been in that room and I had seen his face.

And he said, "Elias, I am fifty-eight years old. I cannot ask now."

Now let me ask you what yours is.

Because there is something about this book you have never said out loud. You cannot find things. You do not know what order they come in. You have never known what a colon in a reference means and have not asked in nineteen years. You skip the names. You do not know how to say half of them and you have never once read one out loud in front of anybody on purpose.

And you have covered for it, well, for a long time.

Two men on a road with no references at all

There is a scene at the end of Luke where two people get the best Bible teaching anybody has ever received, and it is worth noticing what they did not have.

They are walking to a village, they are grieving and confused, and a stranger falls in beside them and explains the whole of the Scriptures about Himself, all the way along the road.

They said to one another, "Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?"Luke 24:32

Now think about the physical situation.

They are walking. Nobody has a scroll. There is no book being turned to, no reference given, no chapter and no verse, because chapters and verses did not exist and would not for well over a thousand years. Nobody in that scene could have found anything.

And the report afterward is not that they understood the structure. It is that their hearts burned.

So hear this said over you, sitting in a truck in a car park for four minutes. You are not disqualified from this by not knowing the order of the books, and the finest exposition in the New Testament was received by two people walking along a road with nothing in their hands. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes what is read and makes it live, and He has never once required a person to navigate first.

Now let me be careful, because there is a lazy version of this article and it would not help you at all.

Knowing where things are is genuinely useful.

I am not going to pretend otherwise. A person who can find a passage can follow an argument, check a claim, and go back to a thing that struck them last week, and that is worth having. The tradition this site is named for built schools precisely because it thought ordinary people should have exactly that kind of access.

So this is not an article that tells you the finding does not matter. It is an article that separates two things you have welded together for twenty-seven years.

Not knowing where a book is: a fact about a skill you were never taught.

Being unqualified to read it: a verdict you handed yourself, in a back room, watching fourteen people riffle.

The first is fixable in an afternoon. The second one is not true and never was.

And here is the practical half, because a man in a truck does not need a paragraph about grace, he needs somebody to hand him the thing without making a moment of it.

Use the contents page. Out loud, in front of people, with no apology. That is what it is for. It is printed in the front of every copy ever made, by publishers who knew exactly what they were doing, and using it is not a confession.

And write the ones you actually use inside the front cover. The six or seven you go back to, with their page numbers, in your own handwriting. It takes four minutes and it will save you twenty-seven years of watching which way people's hands go.

Nobody will ever see that list. And if they do, the worst that happens is that somebody else in that room, who has also been covering, sees a man who did not think it was worth being ashamed about.

You are able to read this book. The written word says Christ opened the Scriptures to two people who could not have found a single verse, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a page burn, and He is not standing at the front waiting to see how fast you get there.