A little over two years ago, someone suggested I read Acts (this was in a conversation, not just a random person walking up to me on the street, out of the blue. Though if that had happened, it would have been so completely random that I might have listened anyway). So I did... and then I just kept going. I decided I wanted to read through the entire Bible, because while I'd grown up having Bible class in school and memory verses and Sunday school classes, there was much of it I hadn't actually necessarily read. So I kept going through the New Testament, and started reading the Old Testament sort of in tandem with it (to do this without running out of New Testament much sooner, you have to sort of pace yourself on it). I left the Gospels for last. I didn't want to set myself a goal (like, "I'm going to read the entire Bible in one year!") because I didn't want to rush myself, as some parts I definitely took more time to process, while some page-turners I couldn't put down. And so, last Monday night, I finished.
I should say I'd recently gotten a new Bible, too, maybe a few months prior to starting this all-the-way-through deal. This is important. You have to have a good Bible. Prior to that I'd had the giant, bulky hardcover student study Bible that my school had given everyone for 8th grade graduation... and somewhere a really fat but tiny-print, slightly battered paperback (which I don't know where it actually is in my house, come to think of it). But nothing that was easy to take with me or curl up with. So I did some shopping around and ordered myself a pretty light-blue faux-leather Bible. It's not too thick, nor too big, nor too heavy. It's easy to grab and take with me or read, wherever I am, but still big enough for me to underline things and scribble notes or questions in the margins. And it doesn't have any commentary or notes in it, which I need if I'm to focus, because I could never resist stopping to read all the side notes and background tidbits in the study Bible.
Some parts were familiar; other stories completely foreign to me (it's interesting to see what parts of the Bible no one chooses to teach or preach about). Some parts were unexpectedly rich-- my friends are still bemused at just how fond I was of Leviticus and Numbers-- while others, took some serious effort to get through. Like Kings and Chronicles. I am so over reading in Kings "for more details, see Chronicles" and in Chronicles "for more details, see Kings" while both are basically the exact same story. And all those kings... I remember in elementary or middle school Bible classes, spending so much time being forced to memorize the orders of the kings of Judah and Israel. And why? To this day, I can comprehend no point in it. Understanding the history of Israel? Sure. But keeping track of the reigns of Jeroboam and Jehoram and Jehoash and Jehoahaz (I could not make this stuff up) never really did anything to bolster my faith.
At least when they tried to teach us the books of the Old Testament via rap, it served some purpose in being able to find your way around the Bible. But a lot of what I was taught in Christian schooling seems now like a lot of pointless busywork which served little purpose other than to avoid having to talk about any real questions of faith. Outside of the Gospels, the New Testament was left completely untouched until high school (and by then, we did less in-depth Bible study and more "how to figure out what you believe" type of stuff).
I discovered parts that were quite (and in significant ways) different than the "Bible story" versions I was taught of them. And I don't just mean in ways that sanitize it for children, like leaving out the part in the flood story where it states quite clearly several times over that everyone else died. I mean theologically important differences. Not that I have a particular example to give you at the moment. But if I look back through, I'd find some. With slightly indignant comments in the margins.
And in many places, I found my perception of books or stories therein had been colored by common opinion, which was not necessarily an accurate portrayal of what I found on the pages. For example, I think Job's friends get a bad rap. Everyone talks smack about his friends, because they've heard everyone else talk smack about his friends, but if you actually read their exchanges, they sound a lot like the church. (And I don't think wrongly so. They're really supportive. They ask Job if he's gone against God and deserved the fallout in his life, and talk about how people can never measure up as righteous before God. I don't think they're necessarily too off track in their strategy, they just happen to have been wrong in his particular instance. Which opportunity for misjudgment is why maybe we, as the church today, should take care when making those kind of statements to each other, too. Sin has its natural fallouts, but so does just being alive.)
And Leviticus... well most of the Pentateuch, really, people tend to skip over, once they get past the stories they know from their kiddie books. They assume it is dry, boring. Now, I've never read any of those books about the Bible being love letters, and always thought it a little odd that it referred to all the books-- like, Leviticus is a love letter? Or for that matter, Jeremiah-- what even happens in Jeremiah, anyway? Some other little random prophets with names that were probably hard for them to learn to write, as children? But the law was all these guidelines that not only helped keep God's people in line with his best plan for them, but also to do their best to stay right with God, before our savior arrived. We get to see that alternate reality, the life we would've had to try and live up to (not as a response out of love, but out of having no other choice in the matter) if not for Jesus. And Jeremiah (and others of the prophets' books) is chapter after chapter of God just begging, positively pleading with his people to come back to him, telling how much he loves them and they belong with them, and giving them just chance after chance after chance to come back to him. So, I buy that analogy.
Some particular bits of the Bible I discovered bring me joy beyond words. Psalm 104, for instance? I cannot read aloud without giggling. It's my new favorite. (Though my previous favorite is still a favorite, as well. And the first part of it, anyway, was actually a memory verse at school, back in second grade. See, I'm not saying they got everything wrong.)
Some parts utterly baffled me. I think it's a cultural thing. I mean, for the most part they were sections that just seemed to be completely random thoughts in the middle of an unrelated section. Or to have some significance, of which I have not a clue. Like in the middle of the story, someone suddenly dons a blue turban or something, and clearly I'm supposed to get something about why that detail was included. Thus, this comment (above) is a common one in the margins of my Bible by now. (Oftentimes with more numerous question marks following it.) So now I get to go back through, and look up the answers to all those questions and points of clarification or confusion, that I had noted in the margins.
Also, now that I'm done, I've started The Case For Christ (not because it necessarily had to follow, because I'd never actually thought of it previously, or even known anything about the book before picking it up; just that I now have an additional amount of reading time available to me, and because I happened to pick it up the other day at Goodwill-- along with several other books, I seriously am not to be allowed into the used book section there, as I cannot resist books that are measured in cents rather than dollars). I'm only about 50 pages in so far, but it's already sort of blowing my mind (like, did you know that Paul's letters were written before the Gospels were written down? That one was so surprising to me, it made me stop and stare at the wall for several minutes. I want to finish that book, then re-read the entire Bible again in light of the more things I know about it!) It's already helping me make more sense of the Gospels, which very unexpectedly were among the longest to get through. I'd had only the Gospels remaining, since maybe May or so. I don't know if it's because they were fairly familiar to me already, or because I was reading the parallel parts of the four together, but it just took a long while to make it through them. And with some confusion over the minor parts that differ between them. And surprise over how briefly the entire crucifixion is covered, and how little is actually written (in the Gospels themselves) about Christ after the resurrection. But I've already had some of my questions answered via that book, so it was good timing, after all.
But any parts that confused me were few, relatively speaking. And the parts I've mentioned here that I love are just a few among many, many, many... see, that's the point of all this, really, only there aren't the right words for it. The parts that are the heart of the love letter, I cannot adequately describe, either for what they are or for what they meant to me. The story cannot be understood in just oft-quoted verses without context, snippets and stories from here and there. The true magic of it is in its whole, in the big picture (or the biggest we as humans can understand, anyhow). You just have to read this book.
(Also: if you don't have a good one and you want one, I will get you one. I'm serious. If 300 people e-mail me and say they need a Bible, I will figure out a way to make it happen.)
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