For years I knew the major stories of the Bible well enough to recognize them. Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, the Gospels. I could place most of them. What I lacked was the single story that held them together. The pieces were familiar. The whole remained fragmented.
That changed when Ted and I first encountered salvation history. Suddenly the books began to speak to one another. The colors of the Timeline became more than a teaching device. They became a way of seeing. Scripture became technicolor.
The hunger for that coherence had begun years earlier. At St. Mary’s on the campus of Texas A&M I first realized that the Catholic faith invited a lifetime of serious study. The classes and conversations there awakened an intellectual appetite I had not known I possessed. When we moved to Southern California for graduate school I expected that hunger to continue being fed. Instead All Hallows left it largely unsatisfied. The liturgical experimentation and the absence of substantial teaching made clear that something essential was missing. We were not looking for more information. We were looking for a framework that would let the parts of Scripture illuminate one another.
Providence answered that search through an older couple in Maryland who had ties to Steubenville. They introduced us to the work of Jeff Cavins and Scott Hahn at a time when Hahn was still relatively new in the Church and closely associated with St. Joseph Communications. By April 1999 we were attending The Great Adventure Bible Timeline Seminar in the Washington area.¹ The materials and the teaching confirmed what we had already begun to receive. Cavins offered the architecture. Hahn filled it with theological depth. Together they gave us what we had been missing.
The architecture consisted of twelve periods of salvation history, each assigned a color. Early World in turquoise. Patriarchs in burgundy. Egypt and Exodus in red. The desert wanderings in tan. Conquest and Judges in green. The United Kingdom in purple. The Divided Kingdom in black. Exile in baby blue. The Return in yellow. The Maccabean Revolt in clear. The life of Christ in red. The Church in white. Those colors were not decoration. They were a memory system that made the whole visible at a glance. Once the skeleton was in place, the books stopped floating as isolated stories and began to take their proper places in a single drama.
I smile now at the green engineering paper. Years before, it had held electrical calculations. Now its margins were filled with words like covenant, divine sonship, and family of God. Across the top of one page dated March 10, 1998, I had written: God is Father. A few pages later came another heading: Divine Sonship. Then simply: Covenant is family not contract.³
The discipline I had learned as an engineering student had quietly become a way of studying Scripture. We listened, took notes, followed the references, and returned to the Timeline again and again. The subject was no longer a collection of religious information. It was the story of how God forms a people and brings them home.
Ted spread two oversized sheets of paper across the dining room table and began drawing what Jeff Cavins had been teaching. We laminated those charts because we knew they would be used constantly. More than twenty-five years later we still have them.² Those sheets lived on our kitchen table and later on the shelves. Even after printed versions became available, we kept using the ones he had made. They were not souvenirs. They were working tools. The children saw them. They learned the colors. They began to place the stories themselves.
That is when Scripture became technicolor for us. The words on the page had not changed. What changed was the capacity to see the whole. I remember opening Genesis and realizing that Abraham no longer stood alone. David was waiting ahead. Isaiah was pointing beyond himself. The Exodus echoed through the Gospels. Even Revelation no longer seemed disconnected, but found its proper place within the same story that had begun in Genesis. Once that skeleton was clear, reading Scripture stopped feeling like an exercise and began to feel like entering a living world. It was difficult to explain to friends why we suddenly wanted to read the Bible every evening. Nothing had changed except our ability to see the story.
Years later I opened one of our family folders and found Nicole’s drawing of Joseph being sold into Egypt, completed when she was eleven years old in August 1997. Beside the drawing she had summarized Genesis 37 in her own handwriting. Nearby were additional Timeline pages and notes from Jimmy and John.⁴ ⁵ Without realizing it at the time, they had been learning to see Scripture the same way we were. They were not absorbing every theological point. They were absorbing the conviction that the faith was worth careful attention and that Scripture told one coherent story. That quiet transmission has continued. The same method later led me through a minor in Sacred Scripture and into the materials of the Augustine Institute. Tim Gray’s Bible in a Year, the Great Adventure Bible with its color tabs, and the structured Church History Timeline all rest on the same foundation. The approach has not been replaced. It has been extended.
Forty years later the same skeleton still works. Busy households with multiple jobs and full calendars still make time for it because the nourishment is real. The color-tabbed Bibles available today are the direct descendants of the hand-drawn charts that once lay on our kitchen table. The method has proven durable because it answers a permanent need: the need to see Scripture as one story rather than a collection of stories.
If I were beginning again today, I would start with the current Great Adventure resources. Learn the twelve periods and the colors. Keep a Timeline visible. Read with the skeleton in view. Let the individual books take their places inside the larger drama. The theological depth will follow. The desire to keep reading will follow as well.
The words of Scripture had not changed. The eyes that read them had. Scripture had become technicolor.
Endnotes
¹ Family Archive, Jeff Cavins and Tim Gray, The Great Adventure Bible Timeline Seminar flyer, Washington area, April 1999.
² Family Archive, Ted Early, hand-drawn laminated Our Father’s Plan Timeline, ca. 1997–1998.
³ Family Archive, Karen Early notebooks, green engineering paper, dated March 10, 1998.
⁴ Family Archive, Nicole Early, Timeline drawing of Joseph sold into Egypt, August 1997 (age 11).
⁵ Family Archive, additional children’s Timeline pages and notes (Jimmy and John), ca. 1998–1999.
⁶ Family Archive, Great Adventure Bible with color tabs and Bible Timeline Band color key.