Walking and dreaming

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting inside a favorite Starbucks on Madison Avenue looking west on 41st Street at the New York Public Library and Met Life building (and, yes, I always think of Oscar Woodall whenever I see it).

East 41st street is also known as Library Way and way back when I first started this website I wrote about it. I remember I was full of confidence and curiosity back then. I couldn’t get my hands on enough books about the Bible. All I did every day was read, underline, highlight, star and scribble margin notes. I would walk around the city with my Walkman constantly on, listening endlessly to cassette tapes of Alexander Scourby (reading from the entire Bible) and Richard Jordan (delivering old studies, some of them dating back to when I first started attending Shorewood in 1991).

I am having a pretty good time here back in my old city but I really know now more than ever why I was meant to move back to Chicago. This place has changed and so have I. The only real constant is my all-consuming thoughts about my book.

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Here’s the article I wrote from Dec. 12, 2004, only a month before Oscar (a kindred spirit who still has the ability to instantly bring tears to my eyes when I think of him) died:

Across the street from the New York Public Library off Madison Avenue is what's called “Library Way." For the length of a whole city block, on both sides of the street, are quotes from famous artists embedded in sidewalk squares on engraved bronze plaques.

I was exiting a Starbucks onto this unusual block the other day when I decided to take the “tour." Some of the quotes really make me think of the King James Bible.

For example, Rene Descartes is quoted as saying, “…the reading of books is like a conversation with the best men of the past centuries."
I think that's a lot of how it becomes when you familiarize yourself with the writings of guys like Paul, David, Solomon, John, Moses, Peter.

Suddenly you find yourself thinking about them as they really were and you're going through exactly what they were going through with them. It's like you're part of their life journey and you experience vicariously through them what was going on in their space of history.

A sidewalk quote from Francis Bacon reads, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…"

This sums up the Bible! It's a living Book, just as it tells us it is. It's organic, not static. It literally alters your life by the reading of it and believing it's from God. God literally communes with you as the reader. The more you consume, the more it fills up your heart and mind. In fact my pastor is the one to first tell me that the Words of the Book are stored up in your soul.

In the Book of Revelations, John actually talks about literally eating a book given him from an angel. He writes that he “ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter." Jesus Christ is the one who said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."

Emily Dickinson is quoted on the sidewalk as saying, “A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day."
Jesus Christ calls himself the "Word made flesh." The first verse in John reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The word "word" is capitalized.

Virginia Woolf's sidewalk quote speaks to why God would absolutely not be who He says He is and would be a total fraud if His Book didn't completely represent Him and be wholly accurate. Her quote reads, “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

If you think about all the information we have about Jesus Christ--how He lived, what He said, the miracles He performed—it all comes from the Bible. And none of the four separate accounts contradict one another in any way. I think one of the reasons God gave us four different write-ups for Jesus' life is that He wanted us to see how each of the men, coming from different backgrounds, wrote in a different style and included different details of the same stories, but they all matched in what they said happened.

The Bible is the only objective standard for truth. It's the authority on truth and it's where truth is defined in all its forms.

Tom Stoppard is quoted on a plaque as saying, “Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light."
In Genesis 1 we're told God said, “Let there be light: and there was light." It says he divided the light from the darkness. Jesus Christ said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life."
In the Book of Acts the reader is told Paul was commanded by the risen Jesus Christ to be “a light unto the Gentiles."

Muriel Rukeyser says on one of the plaques, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms." Thousands and thousands of different stories are contained within the Old and New Testament and represent the history of the universe. The stories that emerge from those written stories are endless.

On a plaque dedicated to the words of Ernest Hemingway, he says: “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

This is exactly what the Bible delivers on things that really did happen. God makes it clear He's the author of His Book. In Hebrews, Jesus Christ is referred to as “the author and finisher of our faith." The Apostle Paul assures us, “For God is not the author of confusion."

I look at the King James Bible as my most intimate possession. It's where all insight into what God's about and how He thinks is found. The more I examine its ins and outs, the more I know Him and the deeper my kinship with Him goes.