I’ve been pondering this subject of love for a while—and not really getting very far. I think I’m trying to over-complicate it. I keep reading 1 Corinthians 13 and thinking, “It can’t possibly be that simple. There has to be more, there has to be something I’m missing.” I think it’s my tenth grade English teacher’s fault.
In elementary and middle school, I loved reading and writing. I read probably hundreds of books of all kinds, I wrote stories and poems and loved to play around with the sounds of language.
Then I landed in Miss Haas’s English class. For the first time while studying literature, I had to interpret more deeply, I had to look for meaning and significance and subtext and metaphor and references. For the most part, I had been content to look at the surface level of what I was reading, and I got a lot out of it that way. But Miss Haas wasn’t satisfied with that. She expected us to get out our plows and turn over the soil and see what was underneath.
Don’t get me wrong—I have no problem with the concept of looking for deeper meaning and significance in what I’m reading. I just have a problem with the way Miss Haas taught it. You see, in her class, the interpretation she gave to something (which I now strongly suspect was simply the interpretation that was outlined in the teacher’s manual) was the right one. Anything else was wrong. During a typical class, we would be discussing a passage in a novel we were reading, and she’d ask us to explain what we thought was the meaning behind a word or a phrase or a description of something. And we’d answer. And more often than not, she’d say, “No, that’s wrong.” There was no further discussion about it, though, and no explanation of how or why our interpretation might be flawed. Just a flat dismissal of our way of thinking.
So I came to conclude that I really had no skill at making those deeper connections, that the true meaning of what I read would forever elude me and I would be doomed to drift in the gray, shallow world of superficiality. To this day, I struggle with that.
But here’s what I love about Scripture. God designed it so that you can approach it and appreciate it and connect with it on so many levels. Miss Haas would probably hate Scripture, because there is no one “right” way to approach it. The truth is that the Bible is just that simple, that the surface level interpretation istrue and right and real. Of course there’s far more to it than that, but the beauty of it is that you don’t miss the Truth when you only see that surface. The deeper meaning only enriches it.
All that to say that I’ve been struggling for weeks with 1 Corinthians 13, only to realize that the simple, obvious interpretation is perfectly fine. I’m still digging deeper, trying to find personal applications, but I’m not going to stall any more like I’ve been doing.
Photo Credits: english note book by bob gamble, 2/4/05
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