Photo and Commentary (c)2025 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, December 27, 2025
This week on a visit to our local library, I paused in front of the Friends of the Library shelves, where donated books are offered for sale (paperbacks 50 cents and hardbacks a dollar).
What caught my attention, and the reason why I positioned the camera so it was front-center, was The Berlitz Self-teacher: Italian. My mind whooshed back to the end of my 8th grade year at a one-room Seventh-day Adventist grade school. My very perceptive teacher, who was leaving, gave me a few of her personal books, and my favorite among them was The Berlitz Self-teacher: Spanish.
After my first glance inside the book, I was filled with electric ambition. “I can do this,” I said to myself, and that whole summer I burrowed relentlessly through its pages.
One thing that encouraged me was that all through the book, there were three lines of type. The top was Spanish, and just below it were phonetic pronunciations. (“Libro.” LEE-broh.) The third line was English.
Another thing that made the book interesting was that it was intensely practical. This was no dry, head-in-the-clouds textbook. Instead, the Berlitz people presented their instruction as though you were visiting Madrid and wanted to talk your way into cafes, bookstores, the train station, major tourist sites, all using those delightful three lines of print. At the end of each chapter, a cartoon “professor” gave you an easy quiz on the material.
By the end of the summer, I was by no means able to hold my own in a Spanish conversation, but I knew a few of the basics. I could repeat the alphabet, count the numbers, and notice the excellent sense of putting exclamation marks and question marks not only at the end of sentences but also at the start. This way, you could work up the necessary emotion in expressing a sentence’s meaning.
If you’ll glance at the other titles on this shelf, you’ll see that this is the “self-teacher” section. Starting from the leftmost book (I’ve got a Grill, Now What?) to Robert Fulghum’s best-selling All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, these books insist that by turning their pages you’ll be better prepared for life.
As someone who’s spent nearly four decades reading and preaching on the Bible’s 735,000 words, I can confidently say that Scripture could be wedged onto this shelf. Through its history, stories, songs, proverbs, not a single line veers off into misty-wisty philosophy.
Why not make it a New Year’s resolution to regularly read large portions of Scripture in 2026? If you do, you’ll learn something far more important than tourist-Spanish. You’ll learn the habits and the language of heaven!
To review what the Bible says about itself, click the link just below: