Driving west on I-90 toward Minnesota, I looked forward to crossing the bridge over the Mississippi River.

I always thrilled at that great expanse of water, and this time Elsa and I enjoyed the sight a bit longer when we stopped for a picnic lunch in a rest park on the west bank of the river.

A massive barge loaded with grain or coal passed heading downriver as we munched our sandwiches and chips, and I found my thoughts turning to Mark Twain’s classic Life on the Mississippi.

Twain recalled how every boy his age in Hannibal, Missouri, longed to become a steamboat man on the Mississippi. The time came when Twain, as a young man, got his chance. A riverboat pilot, Mr. Bixby, promised to teach him the river from New Orleans to St. Louis for $500, payable out of his first wages.

Twain thought it would be a snap. But when he saw the pilot navigating past trees, snags and other vessels even in the pitch-black night, also docking at places not even visible, he wondered if there might be more to this than he thought.

As they traveled Bixby named aloud the different points along the river, and at one point he asked Twain to repeat some of them. Twain couldn’t. An irritated Bixby asked Twain why he thought he was naming all those places.

“Well to—to—be entertaining, I thought,” Twain stammered.

Hearing this, Bixby erupted in a continuous stream of colorful language that lasted until he was spent and “you could have drawn a sein through his system and not caught enough curses to disturb your mother with,” Twain recalled.

Then Bixby said in the gentlest way, “My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book; and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.”

As Elsa and I finished our lunch, I tried to imagine, What would it be like, how could it be possible, to memorize the mighty Mississippi River? But Twain ultimately did, or at least a long section of it.

What if we took to learning the Bible like Twain did the Mississippi? It’s a long river of a book, but it is God’s Word and our guide for navigating through life without crashing and sinking on the snags and shoals of our own sin. Why not learn it “just like A B C,” taking notes, seeking application, even putting portions to memory?

This summer let’s devote ourselves to more concerted study of Scripture—not to entertain ourselves, but to know better the One who created all things, including the Mississippi, and to more faithfully serve His Son our Savior.

“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells” (Psalm 46:4).