Join Me

On a cold January morning, back in 2007, I received an email from a friend in our church community.  The email was actually written by his seven-year-old son.  “My dad and I are reading through the Bible this year.  Would you join us?”

I had made a practice of reading Scripture, but at that point, I don’t think I had ever read through the Bible cover to cover in any kind of systematic way.

One of our daughters said to me, “Let’s do it.”

That cinched it.

To help keep me accountable, I began following a schedule published online:  www.oneyearbibleonline.com, which designates each day a short passage in the Old Testament, the New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs. It takes about 15 minutes a day.

There is nothing magical or award winning in getting the Bible read in a year.  But it changes you.  It was not so much as making a habit of daily reading, but creating a different pattern and practicing it over and over. 

As I read, I did not just underline a verse or phrase or passage that spoke to me, but I began writing those verses down each day in a notebook.  I have found, that in each re-reading of Scripture, I find something “new” that I had not recognized or understood before, and more often than not, a particular way to live that day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That practice of writing verses down gradually morphed into my daily blog www.worddujour.blogspot.com. I didn’t want to just skim over my reading and check it off, but take some of God’s Word into my day and remind me of God's faithfulness.  

In good times and hardship, verses rose up seemingly out of the barren ground, to encourage, strengthen, help me, or to share with someone.

As James K. A. Smith says in his book You Are What You Love:  It is not what we are doing, but what it is doing to us. “That means looking again at all sorts of supposedly neutral and benign cultural institutions and rituals – things that we do – and seeing their formative, even liturgical power – their capacity to do something to us.”

Reading the Bible every day is not just reading words, but the very words of God.  It is a training, a sculpting, and engraving “…to train myself, in this tiny way, to live with my eyes open to God’s presence in this ordinary day,” writes Tish Harrison Warren in Liturgy of the Ordinary:  Sacred Practices in Everyday Life.

I was reminded this week by an article in the Wall Street Journal, written by Tony Dungy and Benjamin Watson:

Read the entire Bible.  This is a blessing – and doing it in a year takes only about 15 minutes a day.  There are plenty of reading plans and even apps to make the process easy.  Encourage others to join you.  How can we expect to share God’s Word passionately and accurately if we Christians are not Bible-literate?

I am so thankful for that simple and profoundly significant invitation I received so long ago, from that little boy.   

Join me. 

 

Your Word is a lamp to my feet,

and a light to my path.

            Psalm 119. 105