I can flip through the Bible at any moment of my day and pretend like a random passage has meaning to me at that very moment. It takes absolutely no creativity to allude to the Bible, so I wish that Mrs. Mary Rowlandson had written only a single remove, a piece on why she was removing her self from writing. It’s a shame that Captivity is so over saturated with Bible quotes, because I’m sure the story would be interesting even without pretending God’s the reason her child died. Out of all the atrocious reaches, the best by far is how she reads the bible. When she first obtains that sweet, leathery goodness, a thought comes into her mind, pick a random book and a random number. Her God given finger lands on Deuteronomy 28, and, as she finishes, her “dark heart wrought on this manner.” So, she chose the wrong passage by mistake. Please, don’t worry, because by THE GRACE OF GOD her eyes worked long enough to read until chapter 30 where she finds what she meant to flip to.

 When I’m writing to waste space or meet a word limit I too search through the Bible. “And now, O Lord God, you are God, and your words are true, and you have promised this good thing to your servant” (2 Samuel 7:28). This is useless to me, so instead I’ll arbitrarily search other books until I find “God is good” and nod my head in agreement.

I’m not saying that connecting your life to scripture is a waste of time. More than anything, I’m happy that Mrs. Rowlandson found comfort in the Bible while her entire world was turned into a disastrous scene, but that’s all she had to say. “I found comfort in the Bible,” would’ve been perfect on its own, and then she could have moved on with the actual substance. As Christians we already understand that our lives are intertwined with God’s word, so once a message has already established a theme of Godliness then it doesn’t need to be repeated so often.

                You could make a claim that this argument has everything to do with the culture of Mrs. Rowlandson’s time, but even in modern times Christians sometimes believe that their holiness comes from how many verses they can recite. “Today I ate breakfast this morning because a ray of sunshine landed on the banana in my kitchen and reminded me of when God said, ‘eat.’” We get so caught up in these words that we sometimes don’t just live our lives. Every moment we breathe is what let’s us know we are connected to God, because He is the one that gave us these lives. I strongly believe that I don’t need to look towards scripture every day to feel that connection to God. Our bodies are made in his image, so isn’t that the connection? The fact that our lives come across hardships and miracles is a given. It’s understood among everyone that Christian people’s lives are in the hands of God, and with that comes the power to not constantly repeat that “it must be God.”

Does Mrs. Rowlandson refer to the Bible so often because of her strong faith or does she refer to it because of how quickly she loses faith? I understand that God speaks to us in many ways, but if the faith is reapplied from his word every day then is that actually “faith”? The moments God gives us exist whether we relate them to John the Baptist or not, and a faith in that comes from within. From this, I confidently say, “I don’t like Mrs. Mary Rowlandson’s literary style.”