Month: December 2019

A long time ago I spent two summer months in Brussels with a group of international Christian students – there were a couple of dozen of us.
We lived together downtown in a narrow house with many rooms that climbed four high-ceilinged stories up stairways of many steps.
One morning I got up early, came out of my room, and was surprised to see a girl at the end of the hall sitting on the floor at the very top of the staircase. Her feet rested one step down and she was bent forward, elbows tucked close to her ribs, hair curved across her face like a bird’s wing. Her forearms rested on her legs and knees; she was reading a bible.
She sat while most of the house slept, having her inconvenient time of devotion in as private a place as she could find in a house full of people. A slight, still figure with something to do, make-shifting a time and place to do it.

A couple of years ago Patrick McGinnis wrote a book for people working ho-hum, pay-the-rent-type jobs but who weren’t exactly ecstatic with their ho-hum-rent-paying and had dreams of something bigger. McGinnis’ aim was to tell motivated people how they could start living their dream.
He looked at time, pointed out that we all have free time – downtime, thumb-twiddling, idling, worthless and frittering time. He figured that all of us can carve out ten percent of our day because we pretty much waste that on pointless things. 10% he said. Do something with your wasted 10%.
Of course, it was a business book aimed at entrepreneurial-type guys who wanted to be successful and make a bunch of money. But that number caught my attention – 10% seemed like a big number to classify as wastage. Ten percent of a sixteen-hour day is 10% x 960 minutes = 96 minutes. More than an hour and a half every day. Basically wasted.
So…note to MHJ: whatever excuse I use if I fail to read through in 2020 remember: do not use I-didn’t-have-enough-time (at least not if Patrick McGinnis is around).

Notes: Patrick McGinnis The 10% Entrepreneur; Live Your Startup Dream Without Quitting Your Day Job (Portfolio: NY, 2016)

On January 1, 2020 I’ll start reading through. I don’t want to be slaved to one of the detailed prepackaged plans – even if I do know they’re helpful. Instead I’ll try to manage the reading-year using my own rough & ready list. My goal will be to read about 100 chapters per month.
There are 1189 chapters in the bible. Divide that by 12 months and that’s 99.08 chapters a month. The ball-park list below tells me what I should be reading each month. It’s close enough for my purposes.

January:  Genesis 1 – Leviticus 10
February:  Leviticus 11 – Joshua 24
March:  Judges – I Kings
April:  II Kings – Ezra
May:  Nehemiah – Psalm 35
June:  Psalm 36 – 150
July:  Proverbs – Isaiah
August:  Jeremiah – Ezekiel
September:  Daniel – Malachi
October:  Gospels – Acts 10
November:  Acts 11 – Philemon
December:  Hebrews – Revelation

I already know that I have a bit of concern about spending more than a month in the Psalms. So I might make some creative adjustments in this scheme. I’ll have to see how things play out.

Last post I asked a what-if question. What if I think the OT is mostly just a tedious relic of antiquity?
I’ve talked to people that figure the OT is basically that – a collection of out-of-date rules and a bunch of just-barely-out-of-the-stone-age cultural weirdnesses. So why bother reading it? It’s a pretty good question, really. I’d tend to understand it if, for example someone said they weren’t reading the OT because it was no more interesting to them than reading an old Calcutta telephone directory. That comment I can understand. If someone said that they weren’t reading the OT because it was of no more value than reading listings of Calcutta telephone numbers then that’s quite a bit different. Uninteresting and valueless are different.
Anyway, all that aside, here’s a New Testament reading plan that might appeal to people who aren’t on the OT-Train. A group called Navigators has a well-organized plan for reading the NT in one year. It’s a nice, manageable plan, and reading the NT in 2020 is a nice goal and a manageable accomplishment. I recommend it.

And by the way…merry Christmas.

Notes: navigators.org/resource/bible-reading-plans

I listened to an online debate last summer that discussed the value of the Old Testament. One guy was pretty resolute about the high value of the OT. The other guy not so much. The other guy said that the OT is not very relevant, it’s dated, difficult to understand, taught things that we no longer pay any attention to. The OT is of secondary value to us. It’s a second-rate testament.
To be fair, he didn’t actually use the words second-rate; but he definitely conveyed that idea.
And when you think about it, it isn’t such a big revolutionary thing to say. If you asked a thousand people – bible-reading people, religious people – to choose between the OT and the NT how many do you think would pick the OT? 100? 10? 1? It’s a rating question, and the OT comes in second.
So anyway, I’ve been planning to read through this year, and reading through means reading through the NT and the OT. But what does a guy do if he’s thinking the OT is obsolete, irrelevant, boring, harsh, temporary, legalistic, superseded, etc? What does he do if he’s faced with reading a second-rate testament?
Well, one of the time-tested answers to that question is this: he doesn’t.
And there’s a plan for that, too.

There’s a bible reading plan that I haven’t mentioned, probably because it doesn’t interest me very much. But I still think it’s a pretty good plan. It organizes bible books in the order that the events actually occurred.
The traditional table-of-contents order of bible books is okay in a lot of ways, but there are places where books are obviously not in date-order. For example Ezra and Nehemiah are fifteenth and sixteenth in traditional bible order, but they talk about events that are a lot closer to the end of the OT – Nehemiah might even be book number 38 or 39 alongside Malachi.
There’s an online chronological plan at Bible Study Tools that might be worth looking at. But for me, even though the chronological plan will get me through every book I still plan to stick with a table-of-contents plan. As long as I know in my head that the events of, let’s say Daniel’s life happened quite a while after the story of Jonah (and not five books before it) then the order is not a big deal for me (the actual big deal is making sure I read all of the books – and I guess as far as that goes I could even try something crazy like reading the bible in reverse, and still get my actual big deal done. Which makes it not so crazy.)

Notes: see biblestudytools.com/bible-reading-plan/chronological.html

A couple of years ago a survey was done on American bible-reading practices. Some of the findings were that 30% of Americans look up things in the bible when they feel the need; 19% read and reread favourite sections; 17% flip the bible open at random and read what they find; 27% read sections suggested by other people.
One of the things this shows is that there is quite a bit of personal selectivity going on. Which means that personal de-selectivity is going on too. If I decide to read right through I don’t have freedom to deselect because reading through – by definition – means reading everything. Sure…there’s selection in the sense that I choose when I read content, but it’s basically a non-selective plan since eventually I’ll have to read all of it.
The benefit of reading selectively for inspirational purposes is that I get to manage my reading choices to make sure that I get daily inspirational ideas (along with the added benefit of automatically being free of uninspiring content). By contrast reading through can’t offer me a guarantee of daily devotional verses (and it does guarantee that I’ll read uninspiring content). The flip side is that when I read through I’m not reading a condensed version of the bible. I’m reading all of it.

Notes: see the article Americans Are Fond of the Bible, Don’t Actually Read It at lifewayresearch.com/2017/04/25. April 25, 2017.

Big books of the Old Testament like the Psalms, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel create a kind of weird mental impediment for me when I’m reading through. It’s not a content impediment; it’s a size of the book impediment.
There are 1334 pages in the Old Testament of my bible. If the books of the OT were divided up equally there would be about 34 pages in each book, which seems like a manageable number to me. But most of the books aren’t close to that average. The book of the Psalms is a hundred pages over it. I’ll be reading Psalms for more than seven weeks straight.
I know the longest books take the longest time because they’re long. But sometimes it seems that the longest books have a magical quality that allows them to transcend time and keep on going without end. And that throws up a barrier in my mind.
So it’s something to keep in mind as I think about reading through. Maybe a combination reading plan that lets me read a bit here and a bit there, that gives me a a break, that changes things up to help get me through is better than getting derailed and wrecked. I’ve got a couple of weeks to decide.

If I could stay awake and read the whole bible non-stop it would take me less than three days to finish – about 70 hours and 40 minutes.
70 hours and 40 minutes is 4240 minutes, and 4240 minutes broken up into 365 smaller pieces works out to 11.616 minutes.
Let’s round 11.616 up to 12 minutes. I can read the bible in 12 minutes a day.
If I can find those twelve minutes, the numbers say I’ll be reading Revelation 22 by December 31, 2020.
I think this number is likely pretty accurate. And I think I can manage the twelve minutes. The feeling the number gives me – it’s a low number, and it hints at a kind of uniform, repetitive sameness – is that this project really might be within my capacity. I’ll admit that buried under that slight optimism is my subterranean concern that when I face the on-the-surface challenges of the bible’s up-and-down geography I won’t be using words like uniform, manageable, and sameness. But…what’s buried today stays buried today. On this day all I want to know is what my time commitment will be. And the number is twelve.

Notes: time estimate is from Gene Veith’s How Long Does It Take to Read the Bible? at patheos.com August 8, 2018 

A couple of years ago a guy told me about a book called The Compound Effect, which said that no big personal goal is easy to accomplish, and if I decide to use one small and simple action to get to my big goal I’ll be disappointed. A small can’t carry a big’s weight.
But here’s the thing. Darren Hardy also said that a small action done repeatedly – day after day after day after day after day – will get me a lot closer to my big goal; might even get me all the way there. A whole lot of repeated smalls maybe gets me my big.
I can’t get my big by doing one big because I’m not capable of one big all at once.
And doing one small action doesn’t get me my big goal because one small can only get me a small.
But many, many, many smalls building day by day by day might get me there. 
So note to MHJ: if I concentrate on repetitively doing my small reads then reading the big book might happen.

Notes: Darren Hardy. The Compound Effect: Multiplying Your Success One Simple Step At A Time (Da Capo: Philadelphia, 2013)