Monday, July 30, 2018

Marginalia

Unlike most people in my Sunday School class who read their scriptures on their phones, I pack around an actual Bible.  That is if I think about it.  And honestly I just grab whatever one I find lying about because you know how Bibles are.  Always lying about.  Which is why I had Ken Cannon's missionary Bible with me yesterday.

Anyway, it was filled with underlinings and notes in the margins.  Child baptism!  Faith!  Missing scripture!  I saw the handwriting of Ken Cannon's nineteen year-old self, and suddenly I had a vision of him being all earnest in his brown Napoleon Dynamite suit, TAKING THE GOSPEL TO THE WORLD, YO.

That was a lot of years ago.  But I enjoyed thinking about Boy Ken Cannon, and I felt grateful to him for writing in his Bible.  That's the beauty of a physical book.  You can see what people marked up or which pages they folded or how they responded (!!!!!!) to an idea.  It's like having a conversation with a previous reader.  A one-sided conversation, maybe.

But still.


3 comments:

radagast said...

Love your post. And this:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39493

Jayne Edwards said...

I love this. I love thinking about missionary Ken Cannon.

Jim said...

Great post.