Do your best

Ugh.  I am sick.  Fortunately I feel much better now than I did this morning.  The baby woke up twice last night (once at 3:30am and once at 7am) to eat, and Kurt took care of that for me.  I woke up anyhow because she was crying, and both times I had this nasty headache centered behind my left eye.

I was hugely disappointed that the headache hadn’t disappeared by the time I decided to get up at 9am.  Nooooooo.  Instead it decided to get worse.  By the time we had lunch around noon, every time I got up, my brain started pounding against the confines of my skull, and it was all I could do not to just stand there and whimper in pain.

Finally I got the bright idea of taking some meds for it.  Kurt encouraging me to do so may or may not have had something to do with it.  I think actually it was Caroline insisting vehemently that I take something that propelled my butt off the couch in search of pain relief.  And let me tell you, 600mg of ibuprofen, washed down with half a Dr Pepper (the little 12oz bottles were on sale at Clement’s last week), was strong enough to send that stupid headache on its way.

My throat still aches a bit, but you know, that I can deal with.  The headache, not so much.  I’m so glad it’s gone now.

I have done my good deed for the day as well!!!

Caroline called me on her way to church tonight, wondering what exactly the Bible verse was that her daughter had to know for the children’s church service.  She couldn’t remember the whole thing, so she asked me to look it up for her.

I walked over to my bookshelf and asked her, “Which version do you want???  Revised Standard Version, New Revised Standard Version, or the New International Version?”  And then I spotted the copy of the King James Version I had on my shelf, which is the version she needed.

Not only that, I also have a copy of the New King James Version.

You wouldn’t guess I’d be the type to collect Bibles, would you?  I love the poetry of the King James Version, but I can’t always understand what it is they’re trying to say in that edition.  Typically I prefer the Revised Standard Version, since that’s the version my church used when I was growing up.  In fact, that’s the version that was presented to me when I was in the second grade.  Each second grader was given a black-bound Bible with their names inscribed on the cover in gold leaf.  I still have that Bible, though it’s now 21 years old, and it’s usually the one I go to when I need to look something up.

Our second grade class was the last one to receive an edition of the RSV.  The very next class started getting the Today’s English Version (now known as the Good News Translation).  It’s a good edition for folks wanting a simpler translation, but it doesn’t have the poetry of the other translations, in my humble opinion.

I also own a New Revised Standard Version.  That was presented to me on the occasion of my baptism and confirmation, Mother’s Day, 1995.  You read that right — I wasn’t baptized till I was 16 years old.  My birth mother and father elected not to baptize me since neither of them went to church at the time.  If pressured to give a religion, my father would say he was Jewish, but he never really felt that way because he wasn’t raised in the faith.  He converted to Christianity (Presbyterianism in particular) in 1988, when he was 42.  My (step)mom had started taking him to church when they started dating back in the early 80s, and he decided that Christianity made sense to him.  My parents refused to baptize me until I was old enough to choose it for myself.

My confirmation class had 22 confirmands, which was entirely too many to confirm in one church service — but they did it anyhow.  It was the longest service I have ever attended, and that’s with a short homily instead of a full sermon!

I have a New International Version which I bought when I was a senior in college.  I know it was then because I was working in the library in the Conservation & Preservation Department, and that was the only year I worked there.  The previous year I had worked in Manuscripts & Rare Books, but when the library began to undergo renovations, they moved that department off-campus and canceled my boss’s funding for any assistants she may have.  Hence my move to Conservation & Preservation.

I bought the NIV because I wanted a study Bible, and this one featured a concordance between the Scriptures and included a great deal of study materials.  I took it in to work with me one day and applied a hard plastic protector to the covers of my NIV Bible, which has kept it in pristine condition through at least four moves.

The King James Version I have is a paperback that I picked up at the thrift store for just a quarter.  I also have a Thomas Kinkade Bible that features the New King James Version, given to me by my birth mother a good ten years ago.  It’s a beautiful edition, but it’s enormous and not conducive for study or even casual reading.

I also have a Book of Common Prayer, though I am not an Episcopalian (or Anglican, if you’re in England).  My first boyfriend, a boy named Mike, was an Episcopalian, and when I moved away from Nebraska after my 9th-grade year, he gave me his Book of Common Prayer.  He had highlighted the marriage ceremony, I guess because he felt we were destined to marry one day.  That didn’t happen, of course.  He was married to another woman long before Kurt and I tied the knot, and to the best of my knowledge, he is still quite happily married to her.

I’ve always been fascinated by religion.  Maybe it’s because I don’t have a very strong personal faith, so I am always wanting to learn what other people believe.  I took a class in high school called Comparative Religions, where I learned about all kinds of different religions, including some less-mainstream religions like Jainism and Hinduism.  At one point we had to do a class project on our chosen religion, which my then-best friend Sandy (whom I really wish I was still good friends with…) and I procrastinated on till the very last second.  We ended up having to take Polaroids (hey, this was long before digital) inside a Catholic church on a Saturday, which annoyed the church official on duty for some reason.

Later in college I took almost enough classes in Christianity to minor in it.  Come to think of it, I may have unoffically minored in it.  Part of it was I was just fascinated by the subject matter, and it was an easy class for me, but there was one class that I am so grateful to have taken.  It was Origins of Christianity, taught by Professor Finn.  It was the last class he ever taught at William & Mary before retiring, and it was so popular that it was standing room only.  In fact, it was the one class I never took Kurt to; I didn’t want him taking up a seat that should go to a registered student.  Professor Finn, the rumor went, had been a Jesuit priest who fell in love and left the priesthood to get married.  How true it is, I don’t know, but it’s rather romantic.  He has made many trips to the Holy Land, so his class on Christian Origins was augmented by all these photos he had taken while in these holy places.

One thing that really fascinates me is how the gospels developed over the years.  Until I took these classes in Christianity, I thought that the four Gospels had come down to us in their original form, that they were written in the time of Christ and had preserved the actual occurrences while Christ was on the earth.  But that’s not quite true.  Have you ever noticed that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are rather similar?  Scholars now believe that Mark was written first, and that Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark, as well as from another source the scholars have termed “Q.”  John was written later, and does not share the same sources, which is why it is so vastly different.

But those four Gospels aren’t the only ones that had been written.  Those are just the Gospels that a group of men felt were acceptable as part of Christianity’s Scriptures.  There are many more gospels that had been written but were viewed as heretical by the Catholic church.  You can read about them more HERE.  That’s why I have a hard time believing the Bible is the literal Word of God, though.  I’ve done enough research to know that man, not God, has decided what was good enough to go into the Bible and what wasn’t, and how are we to know that we chose the right things to include?

So there’s your Bible lesson for the day.  I bet you never thought that’d be one subject I’d discuss here!