Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, March 16, 2025
I found this note in a Bible I haven’t opened for a long time. It’s a Bible that is dear to me, though, because I bought it with money my father gave me for my birthday the year I turned thirty-five. I didn’t know then that he would die a few weeks later.
I don’t think my father ever owned a Bible himself, although he heard and remembered quite a bit of Scripture from his schooling in rural Nevada. My mother grew up in Chelan, Washington, and both she and my father attended one-room schoolhouses as children, and absorbed what they heard older children reciting. They could quote Shakespeare and many classic poems, fifty years after learning them.
Back to the Bible, to what I call my father’s Bible. He never saw it, but he funded it, and it gives me pleasure to call it his. I think of it as my Father’s Word in my father’s Bible.
Leafing through its pages I found several notes. The one you see in the photo above brought instant, but partial, recognition. I remember that a child sitting beside me in church wrote it and gave it to me, as a compliment. I’ve had the great pleasure of being companioned in my pew by several children through the years, both in our current congregation and the one prior to this, and I’m not exactly sure which one wrote this. I think I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities, though, both dear to my heart.
Since I found the word tucked in my Bible, it made me think of who and what were called beautiful in Scripture. Some people were, including but not limited to Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Joseph, Tamar, Esther, Job’s daughters, and baby Moses.
And gospel-bringing feet are described as beautiful:
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation,
who say to Zion, “your God reigns!” (Isaiah 52:7 NIV)
But the verse I thought of first is from Ecclesiastes 3. The chapter begins by declaring that:
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:
And then fourteen pairs of activities are listed, beginning with “a time to be born and a time to die.”
It is in this context of seasons (some of them decidedly not beautiful) that my verse rings in:
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (verse 11)
This verse humbles me to my core. I see in it a Creator God who has designed our hearts to long to live forever, a God who is utterly beyond my easy understanding and glib explanations, a God who loves beauty – who is the definition of Beauty – and who is waiting to bring us Home where we will experience true beauty for the first time.
And time shall be no more! I like how my young friend put a period after printing the word “Beautiful.” It reminds me that God has the last word, and the last punctuation mark. He will put a period, a firm and final end, to the destruction and ugliness of sin.
Amen and amen. Each day, one day closer to seeing His face and hearing His voice, welcoming us Home.