The Bottomless Pond
 When I was a child, my mother had a penchant for long drives in the country on Sunday afternoons. Needless to say, my brother and I were not fond of them; my brother found them boring and I was prone to carsickness on those winding country roads. My sly father, however, came up with an ingenious scheme to stop our grumbling over those Sunday afternoon excursions.
One Sunday afternoon, dear old Dad directed mine and my brother’s attention to a small pond in the middle of a pasture. He then proceeded to tell us that the pond was bottomless. According to Pop, men had “scuba dived” deep down into it without ever seeing the bottom and others had lowered cinder blocks on hundreds of feet of rope without the blocks ever reaching the bottom. From that day forward, my brother and I couldn’t wait for our Sunday afternoon drive in the country, just as long as Dad promised to drive us by “the bottomless pond.”
I often think of that pond from my childhood when I pick up my Bible. The Bible, unlike that pond, really is bottomless. No matter how deep you go down or how long you stay, there is never a bottom to the Scripture in sight. Its depths are fathomless, its texts inexhaustible, and the more you learn of it, the less you realize you know about it. You can read and study a passage a hundred times, only to see something on the one hundred and first time that you’ve never seen before.
There really is a bottomless pond in this world. It’s not the one my old dad told me and my brother about. I dare say that old stagnant pond dried up long ago. Instead, it’s the Bible, the Word of God, a bottomless pond filled with living water that will never dry up.
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