I Am 107 Days Behind on My Bible Reading Plan

I am 107 days behind on my Bible reading plan.

I know the number because the app tells me, in a small box, every time I open my reading plan. I have read the Bible through in a year more than fifteen times. I am a pastor. I teach this for a living. And this year I have not sat down and done it.

Here is what I have been doing instead. YouTube. The news, which is never good and never finished. And the one I almost cut from this article: checking how my own social posts are doing.

I want to tell the truth about that one, because it is not what it looks like. It looks like vanity, and there is probably some of that in it. But it is closer to arithmetic.

My ministry lives on the internet, and I rarely get to meet the people we serve. I am not wondering whether what we do helps anybody. I know it does, because people tell me so. (Thank you, if you were one of them!) What I am weighing is whether this is the best use of what I have been given. The hours. The money. The attention I could be spending somewhere else.

I do not like writing any of that. If you are reading this, you are one of the people on the other side of it, and you are not the thing I am weighing. I am.

That is a stewardship question, and I have spent my working life answering stewardship questions with numbers. My phone gives me numbers. An hour in Leviticus gives me time with God, which is the whole point and not something anybody can count.

I am not describing a crisis of faith. I talk with Jesus all day. What has gone soft is my attentiveness to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. I still hear him, but I am less sure where he is pointing.

Let me name this accurately

The Christian tradition has a whole vocabulary for what happens when God seems to go quiet. The wilderness. Desolation. The dark night of the soul. Those are real, and people I love have walked through them. This is not that. Reaching for the dark night when what you have is a phone problem makes you more interesting than you are.

What I have is drift. Ordinary drift, the kind that never once feels like a decision.

Somebody wrote this recently in a comment on a video, and four hundred people pressed the little heart underneath it:

“I was literally asking myself tonight, ‘Should I read the Bible?’ I said no and went on YouTube to start watching videos and scrolling endlessly. As soon as YouTube loaded I saw this video. God is so powerful. I really really needed this. Thank the Lord.“

I have a Master of Divinity and twenty-five years with Jesus. The first half of that is my sentence too, almost word for word.

The second half is the part I did not expect.

She said no to the Bible, picked up the phone, and the first thing waiting for her was a video speaking directly to the struggle she was having. The same device that distracted her also carried something that pointed her back.

I believe God can use that. My own ministry depends on it. Every day I pray that something we put online will encourage or challenge someone to turn their attention toward Jesus. But being reminded of God is not the same as spending time in Scripture. That distinction has been getting my attention this year.

The valley with no water in it

There is a psalm about a road.

Three times a year, the Israelites walked to Jerusalem for the festivals. Psalm 84 pictures pilgrims on their way to the temple to worship, passing through the dry Valley of Baca. Nobody’s favorite stretch. You crossed it to get where you were going.

As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a source of spring water; even the autumn rain will cover it with blessings. They go from strength to strength; each appears before God in Zion.  — Psalm 84:6-7 CSB

Read the verb. They make it. The pilgrims. The pilgrims are not waiting in the dry place for conditions to improve. They keep moving, and somehow the land they walk through transforms into a place of springs.

Their trust is what keeps them walking. The psalm doesn’t say they go from ease to ease, or that they arrive rested. They go ‘from strength to strength.’

I prayed something this week without thinking it through. “Take me back to the well.”

What I hear in the psalm is not an invitation to go backward. It’s an invitation to keep walking. I do not have to find my way back to a former well; God can meet me on the road I am now. That sounds like bad news for four seconds, until you notice what it means. The well is available now because God is always with me. A hundred and seven days behind does not disqualify me from beginning again this morning.

Just before this, the psalm calls these travelers people “whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.” The Hebrew underneath is more concrete, and I like it better. It carries the image of highways in the heart.

I still have the road in my heart. I am simply a long way behind on the map. In my case, though, nobody drove me into the dry stretch. I wandered in with a phone in my hand.

The branch does not get a report

The more I thought about the road, the more I realized my real temptation was not only distraction. It was measurement.

I said I check the numbers because I am trying to answer a stewardship question.

I know the answer I am supposed to give, and I believe it. One person is worth it to God. I say that to myself often, and it still does not settle the thing. That is because the question beneath is not about that person. It is about me and whether I am spending what I was given well.

Jesus had something to say to people who want evidence. “Remain in me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me” (John 15:4 CSB).

Notice what the branch is asked for. Staying. God is responsible for the fruit, and the branch never gets a report on it.

In business, where I spend the rest of my week, you do not get to work that way. You measure, and you stop doing what is not producing a return. This is the reverse, and I am not good at it yet.

What I am doing about it

Something small is working, and that is the main reason I am telling you. I have two plans going. The one I am behind on covers the whole Bible. The other is the New Testament, one chapter or less a day. That’s the one I am keeping.

There is the whole lesson, and I did not get it from a book. A plan you can keep beats a plan you admire. Choose a plan small enough to be faithful to it.

And here is the part I keep having to say to myself. Any amount of Bible reading is time with God. Five verses is time with God. Leviticus is time with God. A genealogy is time with God. It does not have to give me anything else to have been worth doing.

I am not abandoning the other plan. I am also not going to force myself to make up the 107 days, because that is how people quit.

And I have told one person, which is what I would tell you to do. Say it out loud to somebody who will see your face. A thing loses its grip remarkably fast once it stops being secret.

Take me back to the well, I prayed.

Get up, I hear the psalm saying. Start walking. Keep digging along the way. The rain is God’s part. My part is to keep moving toward him.