highlight.

One highlight of attending Bible study tonight was getting to catch up with the other resident "grown up" in the bunch, Andrea.

First you need to know that Andrea was kind of my girl crush in high school. Two years older than me, she had it all-- she was beautiful and athletic, wore all the right clothes, and balanced out the "cool" side with the "nerdy" side through theater, choir, and other nerdisms like Harry Potter. Once, in the lunch line, she told me she liked my Express jeans and I nearly had a stroke.

So tonight, when she sat down next to me at Bible study and half the table of high school girls went nuts over whether or not we were sisters and how much we looked alike... well, there goes stroke #2.

I tried to contain myself and be cool about it, but eventually I'm going to have to tell her.

In between dinner and Bible study, we took the girls to Guntersville's newest establishment, Lake Guntersville Ice Cream Shop, for a sweet treat. As we ate with a few girls at our table, we started joking about how people highlight and highlight in their Bibles until you realize one day: it's not just the one or two verses that were important, it's the whole thing. Eventually, you figure out that you've just highlighted the entire Book of John by trying to highlight the "best" verses. We laughed about making notes in the margins during particularly moving sermons-- like my "Dirty Harry" reference from a youth conference in high school-- that no longer make a lick of sense. Dirty Harry? Really? I really thought I'd remember that? My high school Bible is out of control-- one big highlight, held together by duct tape. As I looked around the group tonight, I was proud to see a multitude of intimately used Bibles, the leather worked soft from use, the pages flimsy and worn from flipping, the verses highlighted and underlined. All signs of these girls living in the Word.

When it comes to my current Bible, it's not very old. And since I've had it, I've kept a separate notebook for my unruly note-taking. So when you open my Bible, it's not highlighted and underlined. It's hard back, so it doesn't fall open to a well-loved verse. And when I open it in church to a "blank" page-- untouched by pen or marker-- I want to explain to those around me that I DO use it, even though there's no clear evidence. Andrea agreed with my sentiments, having a new Women's Study Bible that she's deemed too pretty to write in. And I couldn't help but laugh over our need for others to witness our commitment to the Lord and His Word through our bleeding highlighters.