By Tom Thomas –
About a year-and-half ago along with a group of friends, we had been for a Catholic based five-day retreat at a spiritual house on the outskirts of our city. Towards the end of the retreat, one of the senior members of the group received a message from the Lord that the Word of God needed to be shared more, starting immediately after the retreat.
Normally once retreats are over, after a few days the feel-good factor and euphoria wear off; the soul slowly retreats from God, as one gets engulfed with the pressures and worries of the world.
But in this case, the senior member, a person very actively involved in the Catholic church proclamation and evangelisation activities in our Archdiocese, took forward the initiative, and wanted to start with Bible classes every alternate Friday evenings at each one’s homes. Initially, to be honest, I was sceptical. Braving the traffic on a Friday evening, after a long week of work, when one is quite tired did not sound very appealing. Also, while I attend daily mass as much as possible, my Bible reading was restricted to the readings of the day from the Gospel Diary till this point. But due to the encouragement of my better half, we started attending. The first order of day, of course, was to secure the necessary Catholic Edition Bibles!
The format of our Bible study meeting is an initial praise and worship session then a one hour session on a specific chapter of the Bible, going into depth by the leader of the group, followed by Q&A and thanksgiving, and ending with dinner. Once the Covid-19 pandemic hit, this moved to a virtual mode, over Google Meet, with every Friday night being reserved for this exercise. We are given a chapter ahead of the class and the leader shares detailed notes which we go through during the session.
We are now almost at the end of Genesis, after almost maybe ten months of classes. And it has been an amazing journey. From such a close study, the figures in the Bible come alive to us. Adam, Eve, Abraham, Sarah, Hagar Lot, Isaac, Ishmael. Esau, Jacob, Abhimelech have been the main characters we have been following so far. And we find on close study, to our amazement, they are also people just like us, with flaws and weak moments. Still they find redemption as they seek the Almighty, even when the fall, and some like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are blessed mightily despite their failings. We come to understand how they obtain these blessings and we can see how the Bible can help us live out our daily lives with all the high points and the low points that come with it. The situations described in the Bible are timeless and occur in our lives even today. So understanding how challenges were faced and opportunities taken at the God-given opportune moments, we learn from these incidents and it gives us a real blueprint to work towards a life united with the Lord at all times.
The Bible study class has certainly helped us drink from the well of the Word of God and we are thankful for the opportunity to participate in this. This is helping us to move on in life and deepening our family bond and with others in the Bible Study Group as well.
If you are inspired by this article to join a Bible Study Group, please do reach out to your parish priest and he will certainly guide you. Try it out and I pray that you may be impacted by the Word of God in your life, as we have been. May God Bless you.