Some of us have known the Bible from early childhood and could not imagine a world without it. Yet sometimes our familiarity with the letter, or distractions such as television and seasonal festivities, would stop us from enjoying our regular times of Scripture study and even make us disinclined for pursuit of spiritual things.
One Saturday morning I sat down to study the Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly, feeling that I had very little time. I was busy packing for a vacation. It seemed hard to concentrate. After reading this lesson every day for nearly a week, what fresh inspiration could I find? But I really needed the comfort, protection, and sense of divine purpose that come from devoting sufficient thought to Bible study. And as I prayed, this thought came: to give thanks to God all the way through for everything about the Lesson-Sermon. Not just perfunctory thanks for words and ideas but an orderly, detailed consideration of gratitude.
Quite unexpectedly, my gratitude developed into a recognition of the labors that had gone into the making of the Holy Scriptures and the writings of Mrs. Eddy. She states, "The Scriptures require more than a simple admission and feeble acceptance of the truths they present; they require a living faith, that so incorporates their lessons into our lives that these truths become the motive-power of every act." Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 196-197 I felt that if they require so much of us as readers, the devotion of the writers must indeed have been great.
