Thanks to a link my literary husband sent me the other day, I now know that bookworms are actual worms—real live pests. In 1928, librarians at the Huntington Library in southern California noticed that something was feasting on their rare book collection.

Bookworms were the culprits, and as preservationists at the Huntington Library discovered, the bookworm had “an astounding resistance to traditional pesticides, its voracious appetite not just for book pages but for leather covers, for even the starchy glue that holds book bindings together. “

My heart resonated with those librarians in the rare book collection, and not because I am a voracious reader, but because as a college student, I worked part-time at the Newberry Library, an independent research library on Walton Street in Chicago.

It was a plum job for this Moody Bible Institute student, especially after I had quit the first job Miss Robertson of the Institute’s student employment office had secured for me at an exclusive women's athletic club once I found out that, at the time, the club discriminated against Jews and Blacks.

The Newberry did practice a discrimination of sorts when it came to its Rare Book Room. I still recall the first time I went into The Rare Book Room. Even as a staff member, I had to be escorted into the room, but not before a Rare Book Room librarian checked that I was an employee, even though she had just greeted me by name. Next, I had to wash my hands in a designated restroom, and as soon as I was done, pull on a pair of gloves. My escort unlocked the door to the Rare Book Room, and I was in.

My eyes darted everywhere, my gloved hands twitching to open books from the Renaissance or Medieval times. Instead, the librarian ushered me to a specific spot, where she pulled out an original work by . . . Geoffrey Chaucer. (I don’t remember the title, but I’d like to think it was The Canterbury Tales.) I held out my hands—my gloved hands—to take the book. Ha! What was I a lowly part-time employee thinking? I was never allowed to touch or handle any book in the Rare Book Room.

The Institute—one block over and three blocks down from the Newberry Library—had a different expectation of its rare and prized book. It was set in one of the stones of the main hall: the Scripture reference of 2 Timothy 2:15, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”

From the start, our most treasured book was meant to be handled.

God wrote the law and commandment on tablets of stone and gave them to Moses. In Exodus 32, Moses hurried down the mountain with the two tablets that were, according to verse 16, “the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.” Moses was carrying in his human, ungloved hands the very words and writing of God.

Those two tablets didn’t fare very well, so on the second set of tablets Moses wrote the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments. (Exodus 34:38) This covenantal language was of relationship—not to words etched in stone but to its Author, who is slow to anger, compassionate and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

David probably would have been banned from the Newberry's rare book room, with his talk of honey dripping from honeycombs, but no matter, God's Word was more precious than gold, and would revive his soul, make wise the simple and warn him from presumptuous sins. Long before the author of Hebrews, David knew that the word of God was living and active.

We joke that the answer to every Bible study question or Bible school lesson is Jesus, but maybe it’s not the joke we think it is. The Apostle John didn't think so when he began his first letter with these words, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life." (1 John 1:1). Or consider the way he ended his gospel writing of Jesus and books, "Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." (John 21:25)

The most prized book in history is one that we touch and open and read with unclean hands. Its author is the one who invites us in. We can eat this book and, unlike the bookworms of old, there is no destruction of its pages, but it lives in us and gives us the words of life. The Word became flesh, became living and active, and drips the sweet taste of forgiveness for all who see, listen and live.