Jenny was propped up in bed looking out of her bedroom window. If only she could be outside playing with Patty and John, instead of having to stay in bed. Although she wasn’t really sick she had been in bed for several days now, and she was bored. Over and over again she asked herself how she could have been so clumsy as to have fallen out of the oak tree. She had climbed the tree so many times before, and she knew every branch of it, and yet one little slip, and she ended up with not only some bad bruises, but a broken leg! And the doctor said she had to stay off the leg for a whole week, even though it had a cast on it.
She had read all the books her mother had gotten for her, but she was still bored. She looked out the window again. A pair of robins had built their nest under the eaves outside her window. She watched as they made trip after trip with their beaks full of insects for the baby birds. Watching them caught her interest, and she began to count the number of times they flew past her window. Then she picked up the book she had been reading and tried once more to get interested in the story. But she soon tossed it aside, exclaiming, “I’m tired of books. I wish there was something else I could do for a change.”
Just then her sister and brother came racing in. “Anything we can get for you, Jen?” Patty asked.
“Yeah, I am so bored! I don’t want to read another book for a whole year!” Jenny said disgustedly.
Patty looked around the room for an idea. “What about putting a puzzle together?”
“I’ve done all of them,” stated Jenny.
“What about doing a crossword puzzle?” suggested John.
“Okay,” agreed Jenny, brightening up.
John ran and got the puzzle they remembered seeing in the kitchen. “Here it is, Jenny. It’s a Bible puzzle. It says you’ll need a Bible to look up the answers. Where’s yours, Jenny?”
“In the bookcase over there,” replied Jenny, “and I think there’s a pencil on the table.”
Patty and John left as Jenny was trying to answer the question: “Can you give the name of the brother of Caleb who judged Israel forty years?” She turned to the reference — Judges 3 — and after a few minutes discovered that Othniel was the answer.
Sometimes there was no need for her to search through her Bible to find the right word. For instance, the clue to "34 across” was: “The Lamb of God, which taketh away the ____ of the world.” Jenny knew very well that the answer was “sin.” She had heard Miss Peters in her Sunday school class talk about how the Lord Jesus had died on the cross so that our sins might be blotted out. Just last week Miss Peters had talked about 1 John 1:77But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. (1 John 1:7): “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.”
As she searched for other answers a card slipped out of her Bible. Jenny looked at it and then felt ashamed. She had forgotten that several months back Miss Peters had given each of them a card with a chapter listed on it for them to read each day. Once they checked them all off she would give them a special reward. Had it really been that long since she had last read her Bible? She decided to start reading it again that very day.
The next day who should come visit her but Miss Peters. It was not long before Jenny was telling her all about the puzzle and how the card had fallen out of her Bible, reminding her of how she had not been reading her Bible for so long.
“I remember forgetting to read my Bible, too,” Miss Peters admitted to Jenny. “You know what my mother did to teach me a lesson? Well, one day I came down for breakfast as usual, and when I looked at the table there was no place set for me! In surprise I turned to my mother, who was watching me to see what I would do. Then she said to me so kindly that the spiritual part of me, that part of me that loves the Lord Jesus, needed food as much as my body did. She said that reading the Bible was breakfast to that part of me. I had always eaten my breakfast before going to school, but for days and weeks I had gone without my ‘spiritual breakfast.’ That taught me a lesson, Jenny. Perhaps your experience will teach you the same.”
ML-06/16/1985