When Dad preached, he’d shout and wave his arms as he expounded The Word to us. And his sermons were very moving. Mom said so. We’d all follow along in our Bibles and read the verses to ourselves as he read them out loud. At least Rachael and Janet and Mom would, but I had to pretend to since I couldn’t read. I’d turn the pages to the right place because I could read numbers, and I was able to see where Mom had her Bible open to. I always followed along because I wanted my Bible to be as worn out as my mom’s, or at least as Janet’s, because I knew that if I was going to grow as a Christian, I had to Live in The Word, and you couldn’t prove you were Living in The Word unless your Bible was getting worn out. It was no use just crumpling up the pages or rubbing a little mud on them. Rachael could tell what you had done, and she told Dad, and he strapped me, not because I had soiled The Word since, as he said, “we’re not Catholics or Eastern Orthodox, we do not venerate the physical book but only the One who inspired it.” So he didn’t mind me getting my Bible muddy, but he minded because it was a kind of lie to try and wear out your Bible and pretend you had done it the right way, which was to meditate night and day on it and bind it to your heart by prayerfully reading it. He asked me before he bent me over if I understood why I was being strapped and if I thought the punishment fair. And I said yes, but after he hit me three times, with my pants up since I had lied by “omission” not “commission,” which would have been much worse and would have made him hit me with my pants down, I thought that really it wasn’t fair because I hadn’t volunteered to be a Presbyterian Reformed missionary to the Roman Catholics of Switzerland, and so it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t read. If I couldn’t read and Janet and Rachael could, because they went to a boarding school for missionary girls and had been to a real school in America that we left when I was two, of course their Bibles got worn out and they grew in the Lord more than me!

Chapter 15