66 down. (and 66 to go.)
for the first 25 years of my life, my knowledge of scripture was limited to the stories i heard in sunday school, memory verses i’d recite in exchange for a piece of candy, and bits of text read aloud during church or on a podcast. i never took the pastor’s suggestion to go back and read the full story on my own, no matter how “interesting” they claimed it was. this still left me equipped with much more than maybe the average person who didn’t grow up in church, but it was all laying dormant. it doesn’t matter how much scripture you know, understand, or can recite – it doesn’t matter how many testimonies or secondhand revelation you hear – it means nothing if you don’t do something with it — or let it transform you.
the first time i picked up my bible to read it for more than just checking off an item on my to-do list, it wasn’t because i had a fresh wave of motivation to read, it was because i had found myself in a room full of people who were not only wielding their knowledge of truth like a weapon, they were seeing results. it was what they did with it — the good fruit it produced — that made me hungry. hungry enough to start reading, to keep going, and to now be able to say i’ve read the whole thing.
i started slow. i gave myself grace. i went back and re-read my favorite parts (sometimes multiple times). but i also read in smaller chunks. i sat with it, journaled about it, prayed about it. i let it sink in.
i have now read every single word. sometimes in the message translation, because that was the only way i understood was it was saying, and sometimes in the original greek or hebrew, because i didn’t want anyone else telling me what it was saying. that’s the thing about books and podcasts and church and even bible translations — as helpful as they are, they’re not God. and i don’t know if you’re at all familiar with the bible, but basically it’s about how Jesus made a way for us to be directly connected with God. which means, with a direction connection to capital-T truth, everything we encounter — from sermons given from a platform to advice given from our best friends sitting next to us — can be lined up next to it so we always know what the actual truth is.
the thing i love about my current pastor is how she preaches scriptural truth and then encourages us to go home, to read the full (interesting!) story, and to fact-check her. she doesn’t want us to just take her word for it when we have access to it ourselves. that’s what i do now. i read with purpose. i want to know what’s true for myself. because, what i’ve realized in 25 years of letting myself be carried by the word of a pastor or a podcast or a book (about the bible) is that none of those things are enough. none of those things are strong enough. none of those things give me anything solid and unshakable to stand on.
what i know now that i didn’t know each time i picked up one of those read-the-bible-in-a-year calendars — and failed to complete it — is that it’s not about having read the whole thing. even now, even after i have, it’s not enough to be able to say i’ve read all 66 books. that at one point or another, i did read and know and (sort of) understand everything God wanted written down. the thing is, i’m not done; i have all of them still to go.
i’ve come a long way from the beginning, but i’m no where near the end. i am still in progress, still in the middle, still becoming. from glory to glory to glory to glory.