I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll.
Revelation 22:18 (NIV)
The Line Nobody Looked Up
They told her in the morning, in a room with the blinds half open and the first cold of the fall on the glass. Her unit closes in November. On the way out, a nurse she’s worked beside for six years told her that everything happens for a reason, and then said it was in the Bible.
I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll. Revelation went out as a scroll, sent to churches to be read aloud, and the warning at the end of it is set on the words of that scroll. If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. John is guarding the book he was given.
Her friend repeated a saying she picked up somewhere, and John sets the warning on the words of that scroll, and her friend was repeating a saying she picked up somewhere. She did something smaller, and it arrives later.
Everything happens for a reason is not in the Bible. Neither is the line about God never giving you more than you can handle. People reaching for that second one are reaching for 1 Corinthians 10:13, where no temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind, and God will provide a way out so that you can endure it. It is about temptation and about a way out of temptation, and it was never a measurement of how much grief you can take before you break.
That night her husband makes the soup he makes when the weather turns, her sister comes over with a pie she bought and says so, and the three of them eat with the game on low and let it run to overtime. She is also, the whole evening, doing quiet work on the idea that God arranged November for her own good, because a friend set that sentence up on the shelf where God’s own words go.
Which sentence about God do you take for Scripture, and where did it come from?
A Prayer to Remember
God, I’ve put sentences from people who were doing their best on the shelf where your own words go, and some of them I’ve leaned on for years. Thank you that the water of life is free and always was. I never had to be talked into that part.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
