As a family, we just finished reading the Old Testament. And
I’ve got to confess, reading the OT really reminded me of good ol’ Frank
Costanza.
It wasn’t all like that. And most of the grievances aired
therein are probably justified. But as I enjoy the privilege of turning to
other scripture for comfort as well as chastisement, the constant barrage of
grievances wore a bit thin.
Reading the Old Testament has strengthened my testimony of
scripture, particularly of the Book of Mormon, where we get a slightly different
shade of chastisement, much more often mixed with compassion and mercy. An
institute teacher long ago said he believed the theme of the Book of Mormon was
God showing us his “tender mercies,” and for what it’s worth, I think he’s
right.
I’m proud of our familial accomplishment for spiritual as
well as secular reasons. Spiritually, as Christians, I think it’s important
that we have our children read the scriptures. Not reading them, well, it
sounds a bit funny. We had some great conversations, particularly about the
chastisement, the anger, and often the violence shown in the Old Testament. We
tried to navigate and separate the spiritual from the secular.
On the secular side, I’m proud our kids read the book,
particularly as we read it aloud. I hear many other children their same age
read the scriptures aloud – or anything aloud for that matter – and they
struggle a lot more with the archaic language than our kids do. We still may
not agree on how to pronounce “Nebuchadnezzar,” but we can at least approach
the name with gusto, having read it aloud so many times.
Also, I got to show this video to my kids when we discussed
Moses and the Ten Commandments. What could be better than that?
We’ve often speculated that one of the “missing”
commandments was “Thou Shalt Invent Paper Really Quickly So This Does Not
Happen Again.”
We have now read, as a family, all four of the standard
works of our church. That’s a good feeling.
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