Apparently, this is the normal question to be asked in a nursing seminar.
There were twenty students sat in a circle watching each other intently as the question was passed around the room. “If you were stranded on a desert island and you were only allowed one book with you, which book would you take?”
My friend Rosie was last to be asked. She’d tried to listen to everyone else’s answers, none of them particularly ground-breaking, but all the time her response to the hypothetical question was echoing around her head. It was unavoidable, but it would take some guts to share.
“Rosie? Which one book would you read?”
I can just imagine it now. All eyes on her, deep breath, and then off Rosie would go with a beautifully honest, gentle reply that would have caught the room off-guard and yet captivated them at the same time.
“I think I would want to take the Bible. Firstly, because it’s a story of hope, and if I were stranded on a desert island, I think I’d need some hope. Secondly, it’s pretty confusing and hard to understand sometimes, but I’d have plenty of time to study it and try and work it out if I were stranded.”
And in that simple, truthful moment, Rosie had given an answer I wish I had been articulate enough to have said in a thousand conversations before.
In John 3: 34 it says, “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit.” And the way my friend fearlessly shared her heart with her seminar group, reminded me that God doesn’t leave us on our own when we share our faith. She could have said “Pride and Prejudice”, yet instead she summed-up the most powerful and culture-shattering book on earth in a way I believe was inspired.
And if that’s true, if God really does give us his words to say, I guess my question is, what are you chatting about?
