“Well, words are my life,” Mark explains to me. “I work with words for a living, I speak them and I write them. Words are what I use to understand things, that’s how I figure things out. I’m a talk-thinker— I don’t even know what I’m thinking until I hear myself say it! And the words in the Bible are the most powerful ones of all. God spoke the world into existence with His words. They’re like a crimson thread that has run from eternity to eternity. And though that thread has passed through the hands of humans, the truth of His word has remained.”
He continues, “My parents taught me the Bible, they handed me the word of God, but they got their fingerprints all over it. That’s why we have to read it for ourselves; we need to wipe other people’s fingerprints off and let it become real to each of us as individuals. I know some people like to argue about whether every story in the Bible is literally true or not, but to me it’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is the truth behind the story being told—that’s the crimson thread. Did a whale literally swallow Jonah? The truth of that story is about obeying God, it isn’t about a whale! Arguing about Scripture is child’s play, and I say let the children play if they want. That’s focusing on the word instead of on THE Word, and the Bible itself says in John 1 who THE Word is. If the Bible doesn’t lay you in the lap of Jesus, you’re not letting it do its job! As my friend Stan Mitchell says, ‘I love the Bible too much to worship it.’ ”
Mark sums it up this way: “I believe in the Big Bang Theory—God spoke the word and BANG! There it was! We’re all an extension of the song He sang on creation morning. We’re all on different paths but we’re all trying to get to the same place, which is to become more and more Christ-like. I believe God is doing that in me… Sometimes I don’t see it much, but I believe He’s doing it!”
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