Medicine Hat Joe

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)

I’ve decided to read through the bible using Plan C.
When you get right down to it Plan C isn’t really an elaborate scheme. As plans go it’s hardly a plan at all.
It’s this. I start reading Genesis 1 on January 1 and keep reading until I get to Revelation 22 on the last day of the year. I read through in just the same way I’d read through other books, starting on page one and turning pages.
There’s a pretty good online site called Heartlight with a detailed – and ominous-looking – Plan C-type readers’ guide – 365 entries with today’s date and today’s chapters listed in bible table-of-contents order. The link is called Straight Through.
Plan C is no better than any other plan. Each is different, and different isn’t better.  All of them are just finding ways to organize my 365 days in 2020 so that in the end I’ve read all 1189 chapters.

Notes:
Heartlight
https://www.heartlight.org/devotionals/reading_plans/index.html

If I decide to read more than one verse a day, there’s a pretty nice online reading plan called Biblica. They have a Bible in a Year: 365-Day Reading Plan. Every day you read sections from the Old Testament, the New Testament, and Psalms or Proverbs. For example, today – December 6 – we’re on the 340th day of the year. The 340th day’s readings are in Haggai, 2 John, and Proverbs. You can choose a version of the bible you like and read it right there on the Biblica page.
Gideons is another combination plan: two readings a day – one from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament. Completely different content than Biblica – Gideons December 6 readings are in Daniel and 1 John. There’s a calendar of daily readings on the front page to track your progress.
Two blended-reading plans. I like both of them.

Notes:
Biblica – The International Bible Society: https://www.biblica.com/resources/reading-plans/
Gideons International: https://www.gideons.org/read-the-bible

Yesterday I mentioned a guy who had a bible reading plan. It was to read one verse a day. It seemed like a pretty good thing to me that the guy had a plan and was working it.
I was curious enough about it to run a couple of numbers to see how long it would take to get through the bible by reading at that rate.
There are more than 31,000 verses in the bible, so I calculated that at 365 verses per year it would take a little over 85 years to read through the whole book, one verse per day. So if I did want to read the whole bible I would have to start when I was young – probably no older than ten – and I would hope that medical and health technologies advanced rapidly enough that I lived ninety-five years. At which point I would get to Revelation 22.

I heard about a guy whose personal bible reading plan was to read one verse a day.
One of the Medicine Hat Joe Bible Readers’ Principles is that one verse a day is better than no verses a day. Way better; hands down better. The difference between one verse a day and no verses a day is monumental. By contrast, the difference between one verse a day and, let’s say ten verses a day, or three chapters a day is not that big.
Anyway,  I’ve already made my decision to read some verses versus no verses. Now here’s the less important question to ask: how many verses am I going to read? Will I read one or more than one?