Remembering the Context

   Timelessness is something that is greatly misunderstood in our present day. We believe that timelessness means that something never changes, that it has the same truth today as it did when it was said so long ago, when really timeless is simply defined in the dictionary as staying beautiful or fashionable as time passes or lasting forever.
    I love to read. I blame my parents for this, reading to us when we were little. I devour books and thoughts and seek greater understanding of life through them until my fingers are covered in ink smudges and my heart is full. One of my favorite subjects to study was literature. But literature is funny in some ways, for you cannot fully appreciate it if you do not know the context in which it was written. Do not know the social and political climate that helped birth the words. If you divorce a book from its context, you may still find something meaningful in it, yet you have surely lost more than you will gain.
    Yet, we continue to go through life, ripping context away and trampling down the precious meaning to be found. We do it with others life experiences, trying to fit our experience with theirs, even if the context makes it so they aren't the same. We do it with works of art. And we do it with the Bible. Somewhere along the way we, as the church, bought into the lie that the King James version is the text in its original language (it is not) or is the best translation (it is not). We think that words mean the same thing today as they did back when it was written (they do not). And we believe that we don't need to know what context the words arose out of (which we do). Shame on us. We have taken the beauty and truth of the Bible and have trampled on it by not being good students. We try to shove our own experience upon the pages when the text pushes back and does not allow for this. What would it take for us to be students of context first, before trying to place ourselves and our situations in the text? What would it take for us to live into the full beauty of the Word?