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From NIV to Meta-Narrative

I had a life-transforming experience when I was about 19. A MEGA-shift that was so simple I am still moved by it 25 years later. It happened when I bought my first NIV translation of the Bible.

All of my life I was exposed to the hearing and reading of the KJV of the Bible. I am not bashing it. But that is all I knew--one verse after another in tabbed formation. I memorized it, studied it for Bible quizzing competition, knew some passages frontwards and backwards. But something happened deep within me when I read the Bible for the first time in paragraphed form.

I can still feel the newness of the distractions (those little super-scripted numbers which represented the verse I was on while reading) caused me and how I had to search through words and even sentences to catch up with others while reading to find where we were together so I could keep up. That learning curve is behind me now. But the impact the Word of God has had on my life since is ever in front of me.

I was reflecting on how sometimes people in my fellowship do not always get what Jesus is saying or what the author is trying to communicate or what the whole Bible is all about and... why that is. In a moment, as if like John in Revelation 4, I was transported in the spirit, back 25 years to a metal chair--one of a dozen, placed around a ‘U’ shaped set of dark table tops we called a classroom in that small Bible college in southern Ohio--where I sat with my opened hard-backed copy of the NIV.

And as if by some spiritual camera set on Super Zoom
it came at my figure
sitting there
until
it dove right into me
and I…
began to weep.

In an instant I saw myself preaching to my current Sunday adult fellowship about my “NIV experience”—a testimony to how the Word of God became ALIVE to me and I wept. I didn’t ask for it. It just took over. (I have since learned that the Holy Spirit loves to have the remote control on my imagination…and life! And I have learned to oblige.) 

As I recited how the paragraph formation of reading the Bible made such a difference—it was as if the stories in the Bible came to life—as if THE Story of the Bible not only made sense but somehow unlocked me—and the turning of some spiritual key so big and so deep connected me with something greater—something I haven’t ever been able to get away from no matter how far I have strayed, suffered, been deceived or rejected by others.

I cannot totally name it, but God used that NIV to imprint himself on me. And somehow now when I read the Bible story, I have downloaded into me the bigger picture, albeit a blurred picture, but a bigger one. In the midst of that instant download, in the moments it took to experience that vision, while I was weeping, my mouth took the shape of a word—meta-narrative.

There IS a meta-narrative. And I am a beloved bond-slave within it. Life only hurts when I am deceived and pulled into another story—a fantasy—but when the fog lifts so I can see, I have always seen Jesus, like a father leaving the front porch steps to welcome the prodigal home, embrace me, and I never want to leave that embrace—the embrace of Jesus, the meta-narrative, and what those paragraphs changed within me.
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