I Will Not Read The Bible.
So I am finally moving on from Chile. I’m actually at debrief right now and I have had such a great time getting to see everyone again. (for those of you who don’t know what debrief is, it is one week when the whole squad comes together. We usually spend it in a hostel and just hang out. We have deep conversations about what God has put us through, what he’s doing now and what He has in store for us. It’s awesome.) We are currently in Cusco and will soon be separating and living at our ministry sites for the month.
This month is Man-istry which means that I will doing ministry this month with only the guys of Gap L and none of the women. There is a lot of vision for Man-istry and I might talk about it later but for now I want to tell you guys about what my Bible looks like this month. Now I want you to close your eyes and imaging this… did you just close your eyes and realize you can’t read this with your eyes closed. HA got ya… Any way, imagine a bible. open it up to Paul’s letters take hold of five pages and rip them out (don’t worry its an imaginary bible you won’t go to hell). Now take that bible that is now missing five pages and throw it away (again imaginary don’t worry). Now read the five pages you hold in your hand and see that you hold the book of Galatians in you hand. This is the sum total of my bible this month.
You see the early church didn’t have a book to study God with. They had the apostles and the letters the apostles wrote to them. That’s what our leadership has felt God is calling us to be this month, the early church. I suppose it does seem like that, we are all male and we are answering the call to be an apostle of Jesus every day that we wake up on our race.
This shift is extremely strange for me in particular. Last month I realized I needed to better understand the character and heart of God, but didn’t know how to go about doing it. I got a recommendation to try a bible study that one of my teammates had done earlier in the year. The study was to read the entire bible in 30 days. Yes it was as ridiculous as it sounded and, I will be blunt, I did not read the entire thing in 30 days, it was more like 37 days.
In the beginning I had some crazy theories about how each of the main characters of the bible was the embodiment of a part of God’s character. Just to give you guys an idea of what I mean, here are a couple of examples;
Adam/Eve— The likeness and image of God
Cain— The jealousy of God
Noah— Faithfulness
Abram/Abraham— Father of his people Israel and a father willing to sacrifice his only son (Isaac).
It was a crazy theory. Something that happened because I read the Bible as fast as I did, is all of these characters in the first few books of the Bible started to fly by. The best way to demonstrate this is to stand in front of a mirror, put your hand in front of your face and start to wave it really fast. What you’ll notice is you stop seeing your hand and you start to see your reflection in the mirror. Your hand is moving so fast that all you end up seeing is what was behind it all along. In my case the characters are your hand and your reflection is actually God Himself. Rather than noticing the almost passable people you start to see the one who constructed the entire thing.
Believe it or not this actually started to cause problems with my perception of God. He started to become a character in this book rather than the author. It made Him seem smaller than He actually was. I questioned His omnipotence, “if God is all knowing then why was Abraham able to argue for Sodom and Gomorrah (he changed God’s heart (I thought))” “If God is all knowing then why did he ask Cain where Abel was?” and “if God is all knowing then why did He ask where Adam and Eve were when they hid themselves in the garden?”
I questioned God. I wondered if it were possible that the God I spent 23 days reading about (the old testament) was even capable of the compassion that I have been told about that came through Jesus Christ. I started asking so many questions that I started a list of big, philosophical questions that I would want to dive into when I finished my reading.
Then on the 24th of December I read Matthew. The 25th I read Mark and Luke. What was so cool about this was how this reading made the time of Advent feel just like Advent. A time to await the Lord. For 25 days I slaved over the new testament. Although I loved a great many part of the old testament, I wanted so desperately to read about the God of forgiveness not the God punishment that seemed to be ever present in the old testament. I awaited the coming of my Lord and on Christmas eve I read the first gospel and on Christmas I read the Christmas story as told by Luke. I started my advent at the dawn of creation, I followed God as He taught the Israelites His heart, and on the same day of the year that everyone celebrates the coming of the Lord, I read the Christmas story.
To top off my month reading the bible I would have been on track for reading Revelations around the 31st of December or the 1st of January. However In the last couple of days I let my reading slip. This was because in these thirty days I fell under a lot of stress. Because I had to spend so much time reading everyday I didn’t get to journal. On my race journaling has been a place for me to process through things that the lord had been walking me in as well as the things that caused me restlessness in my life. Not getting to journal allowed these things to fester and cause restlessness in my relationship with the Lord.
This is why in my last few weeks in Chile I allowed myself to finish in time that was good for me and in a way that when I read it I read something that I enjoyed and didn’t do because I was on a schedule. In turn I enjoyed the last books of the bible so much more. When I read them I found so much more in them than I would have ever expected.
In the end reading the bible in the time that I did gave me so much. This will be the closest I will probably ever get to seeing the bible story as God does. It’s through this lens that see how beautiful this story truly is. A narrative so immaculate, it could only be written by a divine author and because I know that my God is a God of the details, I know that the same beauty could be found in even the smallest verses. That is why I am so excited to walk into this month with nothing more than a single letter to the church of Galatia.
If such beauty could be seen by looking through a telescope, what will i find when I use a microscope?
