The Greatest Story Ever Told

 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ~John 1:1

I'm a hopeless bibliophile.  The photo above proves it beyond a shadow of at doubt. (And these are by no means all of the book-filled shelves in the house.)  Believe it or not, I've managed to give away some books over the years because, although they are entertaining at the time, I have no interest in reading them again.  Danny has the patience of Job when it comes to allowing such a collection to swell our downstairs shelves.

Last week, I'm in that same room putting away the last of the Thanksgiving paraphernalia, when my eyes are inexplicably drawn to a thin, spineless book squeezed between two others.

What in the world?  Curiosity, of course, wins the day.  I pull the tattered book from the shelf and to my utter surprise, this is what greets me.

I am truly confounded.  Where did this book come from?  I have no memory whatsoever of buying it from any used book shop or yard sale.  I carry it upstairs and show it to Danny.  No, he's never seen it before.  We open it to the first cover and find this inscription:

Janet with love from Aunt Nealie.  Christmas 1940.

Neither of us know a Janet nor had an Aunt Nealie.  Reason tells me that I must have picked up this tiny volume at some time or another, but to have no prior recollection, especially for a book this old defies logic.

Why was my attention grabbed by this non-descript, backless book on the shelf?  And right as Christmas is upon us?  My conclusion?  It's a God-incidence!

I begin reading The Life of Our Lord straightaway.  Although some of the language Dickens uses from the KJV might be confusing for today's children with its thees, thous and thys when he quotes from scripture, that can easily be amended while reading aloud to your children or grandchildren.  Since our grand-girls will be visiting the day after Christmas and staying until the second of January, that gives us the perfect opportunity to enjoy some reading sessions together.

You may be wondering, too, why Mr. Dickens did not want his account published as were his other books.  Here is what the foreword says:  A few hours before he was stricken with the attack which caused his death a day later, Dickens wrote a letter to John M. Makeham, who had accused him of irreverence in a passage of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."  The final paragraph of that letter, perhaps the last word written by Dickens, contained this statement:  "I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of Our Saviour, because I feel it and because I rewrote that history for my children - every one of whom knew it from having it repeated to them - long before they could read and almost as soon as they could speak.  But I have never made proclamation of this from the housetops."

The long and short of this is, Charles Dickens didn't want what he referred to as the ". . . best book that ever was or will be known in the world" to be thought of as anything less than that.  The best!

And that's precisely why he wrote it for his own children that they might understand the magnitude and majesty of Jesus' coming into the world to save us all.  It is, after all, the greatest story ever told.

Amen!