Chapter One: The Book I Finally Opened

Before we get into talking snakes, burning bushes, boats full of animals, donkeys offering travel advice, and people wandering around the desert for forty years because apparently nobody wanted to stop and ask for directions, I probably ought to explain how I ended up here. Because eight years ago, if you had told me I would someday be writing Bible stories on Sunday mornings, I would have taken a drink of coffee, looked at you for a few seconds, and wondered who you had me confused with. I wasn’t the fellow who could quote Scripture on command. I wasn’t winning Bible contests, teaching Sunday school, or carrying a leather-bound Bible with enough ribbons hanging out of it to decorate a Christmas tree. I knew a few names and the general direction of some stories, but if you had asked me to find Habakkuk, I might still be looking.

That wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t anger at the church, a grand philosophical position, or some carefully considered decision I had reached after years of study. I simply hadn’t read the Bible. I had heard people talk about it, which is not the same thing, although we live in a country where hearing somebody talk about something for eleven minutes apparently qualifies the rest of us as experts. I knew Adam and Eve were in there somewhere near the front. Noah had a boat. Moses had the Red Sea. David had a slingshot. Jonah had transportation problems involving a fish. I knew Christmas was near the back half and Revelation was the part where everybody started arguing. That was about the extent of my formal education on the subject, and I had managed to live more than fifty years without anybody pulling me over and asking to see my Bible credentials.

Then I got sick.

Not the kind of sick where you lie on the couch for two days, make everybody listen to you breathe dramatically, and then return to work expecting a parade. I got the kind of sick that changes the conversation. The kind where doctors start using words you have to look up later, family members try not to look worried, and tomorrow quits feeling like something automatically included with the purchase. Serious illness has a way of reaching into your life, grabbing all the things you thought mattered, and shaking them until most of the nonsense falls out. The lawn can wait. The television can wait. Somebody being wrong on Facebook can certainly wait, although a surprising number of people still consider that a medical emergency.

I found myself spending more time with doctors than I ever planned. If doctor visits came with reward points, I should have earned a toaster, a weekend getaway, or at least a free blood draw by now. One of those doctors looked at me during that stretch and told me I ought to write. That was not the advice I expected. Doctors usually tell you to lose weight, get more exercise, eat fewer things that taste good, and reduce stress as though stress were something you could cancel over the phone. This one told me to write. I remember wondering whether he had picked up the wrong chart or possibly suffered a small medical event himself.

Still, the words stayed with me. That is the aggravating thing about somebody saying the right thing at the right time. You can’t get rid of it. It rides home with you, follows you into the house, and sits there at the kitchen table while you are trying to enjoy your coffee. You tell yourself it was just something the doctor said. Then it comes back the next morning. You shove it into the junk drawer of your mind with loose batteries, old phone chargers, and every good idea you plan to deal with later, but it keeps climbing back out. Somewhere during that time, while life was moving slower than I wanted and my mind was moving faster than necessary, I picked up a Bible.

There was no lightning bolt. No choir appeared in the kitchen. The clouds did not part, and I did not suddenly start referring to everybody as “brother.” I picked it up because I had time, questions, and the uncomfortable realization that I had made it into my fifties with opinions about a book I had never actually read. That bothered me more than I expected. If a man told me he hated a movie he had never watched, I would assume he was an idiot. Maybe not out loud if he was six-foot-five and looked irritable, but the thought would be there. If somebody reviewed a restaurant where he had never eaten, we would not call him informed. We would call him somebody with an internet connection and too much confidence.

Yet people do the same thing with the Bible every day. Some defend it without reading it. Some attack it without reading it. Some quote one verse they found on a bumper sticker and act like they just completed four years of seminary. I wasn’t much different. I wasn’t standing on a corner criticizing Scripture, but I had a general idea of what I thought was in there, and that general idea had never been inconvenienced by opening the book. I knew enough to be comfortably uninformed, which might be the most dangerous amount of knowledge a person can have. You don’t know enough to be right, but you know just enough to feel right, and feeling right has caused more trouble than being wrong ever dreamed of.

So I started at the beginning.

I didn’t buy a reading plan, download an app, create a spreadsheet, or promise anybody I would finish in a year. I didn’t need another project with a deadline hanging over it. I just poured a cup of coffee, opened the Bible to Genesis, and began reading. I figured I would read a few chapters each morning and move along at a reasonable pace. That plan lasted about five minutes. My brain does not move along at a reasonable pace when something catches its attention. It stops, backs up, circles the block, and sometimes pulls into the driveway of a completely unrelated thought just to see what is going on.

I would read a few verses, stop, read them again, and then stare out the window for ten minutes as though the answer might be standing in the yard. Sometimes I would make it through half a chapter. Other mornings one sentence would keep me busy until the coffee went cold. At first I thought I was reading too slowly. Then I decided the Bible had been around for a few thousand years without my help and probably wasn’t worried about my schedule. God had waited more than fifty years for me to open the thing. I doubted He was checking His watch because I spent twenty minutes on one paragraph.

The first surprise was not some deep theological mystery. It was an apple.

Everybody knows Eve ate an apple. We have seen the pictures. Eve is standing there with the apple, Adam is looking like a man who already suspects this conversation will cost him dearly, and the snake is hanging around acting innocent. The apple is in paintings, cartoons, children’s books, movies, and probably on decorative towels somewhere. It has been part of the story for so long that nobody thinks to ask for identification. That apple has better job security than most people I know.

Except Genesis never says it was an apple.

It says fruit.

That is all. Fruit from the tree. It could have been an apple. It could have been a fig, a pear, or something that disappeared from the produce section several thousand years ago. I don’t know, and neither does the fellow preparing a fourteen-page response to correct me. The fruit itself wasn’t what stopped me. What stopped me was realizing that I had carried that apple around in my head for more than fifty years, and it did not come from the Bible. Somebody added it somewhere along the way, enough people repeated it, and eventually it became the part everybody remembered most clearly.

That is how people work. We are not comfortable with a blank space. If a story leaves out a detail, we will provide one at no additional charge. We do it with history, politics, news, family stories, and especially small-town gossip. A man can be seen talking to a woman in the frozen-food aisle at noon, and by supper somebody three towns away knows they are leaving their spouses, buying a camper, and moving to Missouri. Nobody is lying, of course. They are simply passing along what they heard, after improving it enough to make it worth repeating.

We do the same thing with people. Somebody tells us a story about a man, and we decide we know the man. We see one photograph, hear one comment, or read one angry post he wrote on a bad Tuesday, and suddenly we have his entire character boxed, labeled, and stored on a shelf. We do it with politics too, although politics is really just small-town gossip with neckties and better television coverage. One person says something. Another repeats it louder. By the end of the day, half the country is defending a detail nobody has stopped to verify, while the other half is calling them dangerous for believing the opposite detail they also haven’t verified. If confidence produced electricity, America could shut down every power plant by Thursday.

That missing apple was the first little tap on the shoulder telling me to slow down. Read what is there, not what I expect to be there. That sounds simple until you try it. Most of us do not approach a story empty-handed. We bring assumptions, memories, opinions, and a moving truck full of things other people told us. Then we set everything up inside the story and admire how familiar it looks. I had been doing that with the Bible before I ever opened it. I wasn’t reading Genesis yet, but I already had furniture in the room.

The farther I read, the more often I caught myself doing it. I would think I knew where a story was going, only to discover the actual story had taken a turn I had never heard about. I would remember a person as the hero and find out he was considerably more complicated than the children’s version suggested. I would expect a clean lesson with everybody behaving properly and discover a collection of people lying, arguing, panicking, blaming one another, making terrible decisions, and then acting surprised when those decisions produced terrible results. In other words, people were people. They wore robes, owned fewer appliances, and walked more than we do, but the basic machinery had not changed much.

That is probably one of the reasons I kept reading. The Bible did not feel filled with polished religious people posing for a church directory. It was filled with flawed people trying, failing, getting back up, wandering off, coming back, and occasionally making such a mess of things that you had to close the book and sit quietly for a minute. I understood those people. I may not have known much about ancient customs or desert travel, but I knew something about making a decision that seemed reasonable at the time and looked completely different by morning. Most of us do. We just prefer our mistakes without chapter and verse.

I also started noticing myself in those stories, which was less enjoyable than discovering the missing apple. It is one thing to read about somebody thousands of years ago being impatient, stubborn, afraid, or too confident. It is another thing when the story reaches across the table, points at you with a bony finger, and says, “You might want to settle down. This part sounds familiar.” The Bible has a way of doing that without raising its voice. You are reading about somebody else’s pride, and suddenly yours walks into the room wearing a name tag.

That is where the smiles and the winces started living together. I would laugh at somebody in Scripture doing something ridiculous, then realize I had done the modern version of the same thing three days earlier. Maybe I had not hidden from God behind a tree, but I had certainly avoided conversations I did not want to have. I had not wandered through a desert for forty years, but I had managed to take the long way around plenty of lessons because the short route required admitting I was wrong. I had never built a golden calf, but I had put enough faith in money, work, doctors, plans, and my own ability to fix things that the basic idea was not exactly foreign.

That is the angle of Talking Snakes. I am not coming to these stories as a preacher, a scholar, or somebody who has spent his whole life in church. I came to the Bible later, after getting sick, with more questions than answers and enough mileage behind me to recognize human nature when I saw it. I am not trying to turn every story into a lesson plan. Sometimes I just want to look at what happened, raise an eyebrow, and ask why nobody mentioned that part. Sometimes the Scripture will make us smile. Sometimes it will punch us square in the nose. Every once in a while, it will manage both in the same sentence.

The true believers may read these stories and smile because they have known them for years. Maybe seeing them through the eyes of somebody who arrived late will bring back something they stopped noticing. Familiarity can be useful, but it can also put a story to sleep. You know what comes next, so your eyes keep moving while your mind goes off to make a grocery list. Then some guy who could not have found the Book of Numbers with a road map comes along, notices one odd detail, and suddenly the old story wakes up again.

The folks who are less likely to believe may feel more comfortable here too. I understand why polished religious answers can make a person suspicious. Some people can explain the mysteries of God in six minutes and still cannot figure out why nobody wants to sit beside them at lunch. I don’t have that problem because I do not have all the answers. I am still asking questions. I am still reading slowly. I still reach passages that leave me staring into my coffee and wondering what exactly I am supposed to do with that. I have learned not to panic. Honest questions are not the enemy of faith. Fake certainty has done considerably more damage.

So this first chapter is not really about Adam, Eve, an apple that never applied for the job, or even the snake we will eventually get around to. It is about how I finally opened the Book. Illness slowed me down. A doctor told me to write. Curiosity did the rest. Eight years later, I am still reading, still stopping, still backing up, and still finding things I was certain I knew until the words on the page had the nerve to disagree with me.

Next Sunday, we start with the first four words: “In the beginning God.”

Four words. That ought to be simple enough.

Of course, we have not even reached the talking snake yet, and I have already learned not to trust the easy version.