recent fire drill in the building where I work sent me into a brief spasm of reductionist thinking. If the alarm had been for real, and my colleagues had been hurrying rather than idling from their cubicles, what one book from my office would I have rescued from the flames?

It was not a matter easily decided, for there are volumes all around me I'd be loath to live without. The company of a good book is often to be preferred to that of people, and especially of those who have no use for quiet or ideas, or find in Jerry Springer all the depth their souls are seeking. Assuming, then, that all the humans got to safety, which of these printed friends would somehow stand in for the rest?

My eye ran through the volumes of political and military history, the many works of English and American literature, the Bible commentaries, mismatched editions of the Spirit of Prophecy, and collections of essays until it lit upon the shelf where all my Bibles rest. The choice felt right: there is a certain seemliness about an editor of a religious magazine concluding that the one book he would rescue from the great conflagration is a Bible.

But which Bible? My heavily underlined early 1970s edition of the Living New Testament spurred on my adolescent passion for the Savior. The New English Bible-hardbacked, substantial, elegant in tone-became my solace 14 years ago while I recovered from a painful Achilles tendon rupture. My college edition of the Harper Study Bible (RSV) is held together more by the promises I claimed in it than by the fabric of its tattered binding.

I grasped at last the worn black cover of the oldest of my Bibles-the one that still bears the flyleaf inscription in a firm but gracious hand, "Presented by Daddy and Mommy, 12-25-64." This was the Bible that I took to Adventist elementary school, from which I learned-and occasionally forgot-500 memory verses, the solemn red-letter edition that I carefully placed on top of the pile and never on the floor. I carried it to evangelistic meetings, to my baptism, to uncounted quiet moments when my heart could sing my great Redeemer's praise. From it I learned the cadences of psalms, the assurance of salvation, the promise of new life in Christ-and all in a style of English, I have been informed, that even then was irrelevant and obsolete.

Now, four decades later, that Bible has grown old along with me, a testament (besides those it contains) to hopes and habits planted in a child's life. My parents long ago forgot their 1964 Christmas gift to me, but I never have. It has moved with me from coast to coast, from dank basement apartments to comfortable suburban parsonages. It remains the printed proof that when I seek for "a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God," I am simply traveling on a family route for which the maps and guideposts all remain the same. I have chosen to walk in "the way"-Jesus' way and my parents' way-and the freshest footprints up ahead bear a powerful resemblance to my own.

Let God be praised if you, too, walk your parents' way, or if your children follow you as you go after Jesus. This is how God first intended it, that faith make way for faith, each generation counseled and encouraged by the one just up ahead. For all our rightful celebration of "U-turns" and radical midlife conversion stories, let no one doubt that heaven also rejoices when sheep do not get lost and children do not go prodigal. Perhaps if we said so more often, it would happen less frequently. There is no shame-how could there be?-in having always been with Jesus. There is no greater joy than finding Scripture on your children's lips and carried in their hearts.

And the church, of all God's ways of reaching us, ought to be foremost in saying so.