The Crawfish Bible

. . . they received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so (Acts 17:11).

I learned how to eat a crawfish this past weekend. This was the real thing – no utensils, rolls of paper towels, mounds of crawfish dumped on a table with carrots and onion and garlic and potatoes mixed in. Protocol was simple. Stand at the table and plunge your hand into the heap, pull out a crawfish and eat it.

I was tutored in the basics: (1) Pull off the head of the crawfish (2) suck the juice from the head of the crawfish (3) Find the meat in the tail of the crawfish. Eat. Repeat. Step two was presented to me as optional. I declined to ingest anything from the head of the crawfish.

Crawfish are ugly. There’s nothing about them that makes you want to eat them. But if you can get beyond such superficialities, they’re actually tasty. I enjoyed eating crawfish. My problem with eating crawfish had nothing to do with the unfortunate ugly crustacean. My problem was me. My skill level in actually getting meat from the crawfish was such that significant labor was being invested with little reward. At the rate I was going, I would need most of the night and an entire tub full of the creatures in order to get a meal.

My lack of skill became clear to me when Virginia – one of the hostesses and a former resident of Louisiana (enough said) – demonstrated proper crawfish eating technique. She actually extracted enough meat from the tail of the crawfish to qualify as a genuine “bite” of crawfish. Her expertise left me wondering, “how’d she do that?” I had no idea how to get that much of the “good stuff.” My well intentioned efforts had not produced the same result. In my hands, the crawfish was a resistant and stingy critter, unwilling to yield its delicacies. In Virginia’s hands, the crawfish was a brittle treasure chest, easily cracked and plundered.

It occurs to me that what I experienced with eating crawfish is not unlike what many people experience with the Bible. For some, the very sight of the bible is off-putting. The stark black leather cover with the gold embossed letters that read HOLY BIBLE doesn’t strike people as a can’t-put-it-down page turner. For others, efforts made to actually read the bible have not been well rewarded. If one happens to attempt to crack open the King James Version, the likelihood of returning for second and third helpings diminishes significantly. The “good stuff” is trapped beneath a shell of Elizabethan English. Sometimes the English is perfectly readable, but historical distance renders the Bible inaccessible.

The joy of my life is helping people learn how to feed on the scriptures. The Bible is food for the soul. The Psalmist said that God’s law was like honey on the lips. There is a Hebrew word for “meditate” that also means “to chew on.” Reading the Bible is like what a lion does as it hovers over it’s prey. God’s word is delicious.

Not enough people know this. My job as a pastor is to do for them what Virginia did for me. I love to gather folks together and plunge into the text of scripture. I enjoy helping them see what’s there, how much good meat there is to be found in these pages. And eventually, I’m hoping that they’ll no longer need me to do this for them. They’ll be able to do it for themselves, and then they’ll gather others and show them the same thing. The Bible is good food.

In order to feed well on the Bible two things are required:

First, there needs to be an appetite. Part of the reason I enjoyed eating crawfish, challenging though it was, was that I was hungry. I was ready to eat – so every little bit was good, and it was worth the effort. When it comes to the Bible, some develop a taste for it over time. Others are in a state of soul hunger that sends them to the pages of scripture with a kind of ravenous eagerness. For them, it’s like raiding the refrigerator late at night. Either way, the delicacies of scripture will not be found apart from an appetite, a hunger to hear a word from God.

The second thing needed is simply repeated exposure. I think the main reason Virginia was able to do what she did with a crawfish was that over the years she has eaten alot of crawfish. She has picked them up over and over and over again. She knows what to look for, how to hold them, how to get them open. The more you eat them, the more you know about eating them. The more you eat them, the more you discover about what’s good and what isn’t. Veteran crawfish eaters are more likely to suck the juice from the head. I want to read the Bible that way. I want to get every drop of what’s good from every book, every chapter. This is a lifelong endeavor.

Crack your Bible open and search for the good stuff. Come to it hungry and don’t get weary. Keep coming back and feeding on it until your soul is full – and then come back for more.