What made me think this was a good idea?
My relationship with God has been a study in patience and persistence. To be clear, that’s God’s patience and persistence, and very little of mine. I picture my relationship with God like a hike in the woods. It’s had lots of ups and downs and walking around the same tree repeatedly and then walking around another tree wondering if it isn’t actually that same tree I was just walking around. Sometimes the path is clear, sometimes I have no idea if that’s the path or just some bare earth where a rock slid before rolling off a cliff up ahead somewhere. It truly has always been beautiful. Sometimes it’s beautiful because the path winds past a cheerful brook on a warm day. Sometimes it’s beautiful in spite of the fact that it’s dark and cold and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost the path again. But it’s always been beautiful because, no matter what is going on or what things look like, God is with me in it.

My journey began in Ezekiel…

Every now and then along the path there will be a step carved into a rock or some root that takes me, quite quickly, from the level I’m walking to a whole new level. I can point to many of those steps throughout my life, but the one that led me into a joyful preoccupation with the Bible was a Bible study by a well-known author named Beth Moore. She challenged me to believe, among many important things, that every part of the Bible was alive and that every bit of it mattered to my life. I remember the morning I sat in my office and challenged God (perhaps a stupid thing to do, but he is notoriously kind to stupid people like me) to meet me in the book of Ezekiel. I had tried to read that book before. I had read all the words but it was a lot of crazy prophecy and vision stuff and I was certain it couldn’t matter to my life. But that morning I told God that I believed his word was alive and active, and I wanted to know what he had to say to me in Ezekiel. Before I left my office that morning I was sobbing. In the early chapters, God paints a picture of his love for Israel. It’s a picture of deep, undeserved love characterized by lavish, extravagant kindness. His love is rewarded with prideful rejection. It was painful to read. As I did, I started to see God and myself differently. I understood his heart better and was overwhelmed by his graciousness. I could see my own heart more clearly. I knew that at one moment it reflected God’s kindness and in the next it mirrored Israel’s selfishness. That morning forever changed my relationship with the Bible.

It became something of an obsession

Not long after, a woman named Faith Crosby would speak at an event I attended and encourage us to memorize scripture, another step in the pathway. It took me a few years, but I eventually memorized thirty-eight chapters of the Bible including the entire books of Ephesians and Colossians. I chose chapters from several different books and it was uncanny how, no matter what I was memorizing, it perfectly applied to the situation I was in while learning it. The process of memorizing and retaining all these passages started to get insanely time consuming for a young mom who was also finishing a university degree. But right about that time, my mom told me she had started copying whole books of the Bible to help her learn and focus. My little ADHD brain thrived on this practise. I’m someone who can read a page and have no idea what was on it, but when I copied it out, that slowed me down. It forced me to notice what was being said. I learned life-changing, life-giving things as, over the next few years, I copied out the entire Bible into notebooks. When I finished a couple of summers ago I just grabbed a different version of the Bible, another notebook, and started over.
I know it sounds kind of silly and simplistic to say it, but I really love the Bible. The more time I spend in its pages the more time I want there. It’s weirdly addictive. Amusingly, this growing obsession of mine was causing a bit of a problem. You see, for every person God created, but especially for those who have chosen to trust him with their lives, God has specific roles he designed us to fulfill. With those roles he has given us talents and abilities. I have come to realize that one of my purposes is to teach other people. When I learn something I find interesting, I’m not happy until everyone around me knows about it. It’s just the way God made me. The problem was that I was getting so excited about studying the Bible for myself that I was having trouble finding time to share what I was learning with the people around me.
I had been doing “devos” with many of my friends. Sometimes it would be a book about a faith-related topic and we would meet in a group and talk our way through. Sometimes it would be through a daily app (I always used YouVersion) where you could read someone’s thoughts on a topic like parenting, anxiety, marriage or whatever and some accompanying verses. Then you could share in a private comment section with one another what you learned or thought about the readings. It was great! But after doing a couple hundred of these devos I was getting a little resentful of the time it took to do devos with my friends.

I didn’t want to study devos about the Bible. I wanted to study the Bible. I convinced a couple of my most diligent devo buddies (my friend Carrie and sister Amy) to skip the devo format and just go through books of the Bible with me. We would divide a book up into small, sequential passages, read or write it out and then text one another every day about what we saw in that day’s passage. Often it was just something that stood out a little differently to us. Sometimes it was a question or even a concept that we found troubling. Frequently it was something in the passage that made sense in a new way. The idea was that we had to read the Bible with enough attention that we would have something to talk about.

It seems like this is my destination, or at least my next stop

What happened was that sometimes I would notice things that I got really excited about. I’m not a super pensive, keep it to myself kinda girl. I’m a “If I learn something cool, I want everyone to know about it “ kinda girl. So occasionally, I shared something I learned on Facebook or Instagram and other people were encouraged. I even had a couple people tell me to keep writing and sharing what I was learning. It seemed like a good idea at the time. As I worked on it, I was not always sure. I started referring to it as an exercise in relentless obedience because the only thing that kept me focused some days was a very real sense that God told me to do this. I’m not honestly sure if he told me to do it so that I would spend that deep, diligent, I-won’t-quit-until-I-figure-this-out time with him, or if he also wanted me to share it. But here we are just in case it was for both of us.
Whether this was just for me, or if it was for sharing, I am so grateful for the time God spends with me as I work through each book. I love the way he draws my attention to some of the little things I never saw before. I love the way he helps me see how the passage I’m reading connects to the whole greater narrative of the Bible. I really love the way he keeps showing me how amazing he is and how much he loves me.
It’s baffling.
It’s humbling.
It’s addicting.

I’m inviting you to join me by reading the book of Luke a short passage at a time and then chatting it through. I’ve done this with friends who know and love the Bible like I do, but if you are new to the Bible, you are the person I would most love to join with me. With you in mind, I will try to give a little backstory and fill in the blanks as we go along.

I’m hoping to post my way through a passage at a time on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So you can come along with me, or come along at your own pace. I hope somehow, my love for the Bible and especially the God who gave it to us, will spread to you too.

Maybe one day he will help me go through the whole Bible this way. All I know is I’m here for whatever he has for me, because I get to go through it with him.