I pull out my old leather-bound Bible, held together loosely by bursting seams and peeling glue — yet somehow, it is still bound and beautiful. In so many ways, it resembles my own heart: falling apart and loosely held together by the Word of God.

 

I see a Bible that has been with me since childhood. I wasn’t raised a Christian, but once, a very long time ago, someone gave this Bible to me and God used it as a prophetic declaration over my life that I would one day be inseparable from it.

 

Now, time itself has kissed her cover and the pain of the past has worn her seams. She is old— she is experienced— but there is an affinity that I possess for that Bible that has only been born through labor. Her peeling leather and faded colors represent the life that has unfolded while in her care.

 

I look at her war-torn cover. She was once a childishly bright pink and green, but in time, with wear, she has faded and mellowed. Chunks of pink leather are missing from years of being carried around in the sunshine and the rain. Heat has stolen from her. Rain has plundered her. Yet the elements that wore her down never robbed her of her beauty. My Bible looks different than it did ten years ago, but it has only ever grown more beautiful.

 

Faintly, at the bottom, where, in gold emblem, the name “Elizabeth Grace” once was, now only reads “Eliza”; Eliza, which means joyful. I am joyful.

 

I flip her open. There is blood on the pages from an accident that I was in almost a decade ago. I was hanging upside down, suspended mid- air by my seatbelt, bleeding from my head and my forearms, and all I could think about was needing my Bible. I unlatched the seatbelt and fell into the shattered glass that lined the roof of my car— the roof that had become the floor when my car had flipped over— and I scrambled in the dark, fingers frantically searching for her familiar touch. When my hands met hers, I pulled the Bible under my chest and called for the help of a Savior so that I could call for the help of someone who could get me out of that car.

 

I delicately touch the crimson stains that my hands left all those years ago and my heart floods with reverence for the crimson stains of a Savior’s hands that wrote the very reason for this book thousands of years ago.

 

This book tells a story— she has something to share. She is wisdom and knowledge and the physical and written word of God, but she is not it. She is not the only. The love story contained in these pages is not limited to these pages. The Word of God was written and recorded, but it is still being added into in our lives today.

 

In my communion with the Lord, He has told me things that do not appear in the Word. He has whispered sweet nothings into my ear, speaking into my purpose and identity. He has added a confidence and a covenant of His love to me that cannot be kept within the confines of one book

 

The Bible is beautiful. It is a tool to teach, but it is also the poetry of wedding vows to God’s beloved— us— and it doesn’t end on the wedding day.

 

My heart laughs as it considers Song of Solomon (or Song of Songs). For many years that book brought color to my cheeks in childish embarrassment… but what once brought averted eyes and flushed cheeks now brings tears to my eyes that glaze my cheeks in the poetic and gloriously overwhelming love of a Husband in Heaven.

 

Sometimes I read the book aloud— words drip like honey from my lips and the presence of power raises hair on my neck.

 

 

 

 

3 Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest

is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade,

and his fruit is sweet to my taste.

4 Let him lead me to the banquet hall and let his banner over me be love.

5 Strengthen me with raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am faint with love.

6 His left arm is under my head,

and his right arm embraces me.

7 Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you

by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love

until it so desires.

8 Listen! My beloved!

Look! Here he comes, leaping across the mountains,

bounding over the hills.

9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.

Look! There he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows,

peering through the lattice.

10 My beloved spoke and said to me,

“Arise, my darling,

my beautiful one, come with me.

11 See! The winter is past.

the rains are over and gone.

12 Flowers appear on the earth.

the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves

is heard in our land.

13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;

the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.

Arise, come, my darling;

my beautiful one, come with me.

 

Song of Songs 2: 3-13

 

 

 

 

As I read it aloud, hot tears sting the back of my eyes. My cheeks no longer blush with the shame of reading someone else’s love letter. This is God’s love letter to me. Where I once was encompassed with misunderstanding of the purpose of this Scripture, I now find comfort and romance in knowing that this is God’s heart for me.

 

This is a Scripture fully devoted to expressing God’s love for His bride– the church… us. There is no mention of law or any concordance of rules or rulings. There is no reference to Israel’s sin or shame or plight to return to God. Song of Solomon is a book about affectionate desire and sweet affirmations. It is an invitation to intimacy: a glimpse into what a future with Jesus looks like.

 

Everything about this book tells me that God’s love for me is immense beyond words and beyond pages. The way His heart yearns for me to come back to Him and be restored is a narrative in its own.Solomon unwinds a word to a lover that parallels and metaphors God’s words to me.

 

In the original Hebrew, the calligraphy alone is a masterful poetry. The written words and characters decant delicately from one to another; even in appearance, the Hebrew words unravel a love story in their penmanship. The way the arc of one letter crests and crescendos into the next writes a romance that even the words and the meanings themselves fail to. Romanctic and reckless, passionate love line the pages in the middle of my Bible, reminding me what the pages before and after are motivated by.

 

As the eight chapters of this book unfold, devoid of instruction or advice, they prove to me that God’s goal is simply to love me, not to fix me. He finds me outside of the gates and longs for me and me alone. He doesn’t woo me to change me, He calls on me to call out what He loves about me.

 

The first few times that I read Song of Songs, I understood it to be purely sexual. Yet now, in the height of intimacy with Christ, I see it to be a Groom so in love with His bride that He sees none of her flaws and shares no hesitation in loving every part of her. He speaks of her eyes and her breasts and her teeth and her curves, highlighting how they restore Him.

 

To the Groom, the bride is perfect.

 

To God, we are perfect.

 

He holds us not to our sins, shames, or our imperfections. He calls us “Beloved” and calls us beautiful and calls us the loves of His life.

 

The Hebrew word in verse three that represents the word “Beloved” is a word that implies that the woman is a virgin: a pure and spotless bride.  How better to understand the heart of God than to know that when He calls us to be His, He is calling us apart from the lovers of our past, recognizing that our sin died with Jesus and we are now clean before Him.

 

The love story continues even though the Bible does not. These Scriptures show us how the Lord longs to speak to us, and I believe that it is not limited to what is written in the Word. The work of the Lord lives on in me and in you, writing on our hearts a love poem of glory to be recognized for generations to come.

 

For it is even written that Jesus, in his short life, performed so many works that the world did not possess enough books to record it all. Jesus, even in and through his death, was still acting, still doing, and still giving Himself into what would one day be contained in the Bible that now lays in my lap.

 

If there wasn’t enough room to condense the love of Christ that was lived out in the short span of His lifetime, I am certain that there are not enough words to share the very depth and extent of the wild and uncontainable love for us.

  

We are LIVING scripture. We are the bride. We are God’s story being continued and written through our faith. His love for us romances us in the now, but it also blesses our children in the future as they hear our stories of the miracle working hand of Jesus.

 

While we are not the canonized Bible, our lives are given over as the Living Word. While our testimonies will not be recorded by the disciples, they become Scripture to our families and all those who hear the work of the Lord in our life.

 

The Lord gave us the Bible to show us examples of His extravagant love, but He has given us life so that we may experience His extravagant love.

 

This love— the love that Solomon and Paul and Moses and Peter wrote about— is given to be heard and to be lived. Day by day, as my understanding of God’s love grows, as does my understanding that this is a love that far expands past the covers of a book.

 

God loves you. He longs to be restored to you. In all the ways that men and parents and families have failed to, He loves you in a way that far surpasses the ways that they have hurt you. So, come be a Beloved. Come be loved. Come be taken care of and told how wonderful and beautifully set apart you are.