MODESTO, Calif. -- To illustrate the importance of the Bible to her children, Debbie Boling handwrote two copies of the New Testament and presented one each to her son and daughter when they graduated from high school.

The Sacramento Bee reported now that they have graduated college, Boling presented them with copies of the Old Testament, each containing about 6,000 handwritten pages.

"I wanted to give them the type of Bible that would really mean a lot to them, a way of showing the importance that I put in the Word of God," she said.

Boling started the project when her son, Joshua, was a sophomore in high school and worked on it for about 10 years.

"A co-worker told me, ‘This is obsessive, you need some help,'" Boling said. "I thought, ‘It's better to be obsessed with this than something else.' It's not an obsession to me. It is love, a love for God's Word."

Boling spent about three years on her first copy of the New Testament. Her second only took two months because she was pressed by her daughter's looming graduation.

Her first Old Testament took nearly four years. The second, also completed under deadline pressure, took a little over a year.

Her tedious efforts -- she would redo an entire page if she made a mistake -- were appreciated.

"That takes up so much time, and nowadays time is so valuable," Boling's 22-year-old daughter, Andrea Boling, told the newspaper. "To spend 10 years on a project for your children…I open it up and it's just like, ‘Wow, that's so cool.'

"It s just something that I believe she really wanted to do for both of us, to show how important the Word is and how much she loves us," she said.

Boling's pastor, Ken Swett, said he was amazed when he learned of her project.

"I honestly thought, ‘There's no way she can do that,' but she kept plugging away," he said.

Enormous as it seems, Boling said her project is something anybody can do.

"My challenge isn't so much for everybody to write the Bible as it is to see the importance of it, not only reading the Word but living the Word and being that example to other people, whether your children or other people you influence," she said.