I disappeared for six months. Here’s the 3 small choices that changed how I read the Bible (and one of them is a tool I helped build)
Friend,
I have been quiet for a while. Six months quiet, in fact. The last thing I sent you was a piece about a year of running Scriptureside, and then I closed the laptop, and then a lot of life happened, and then I opened the laptop again, and here we are.
I want to tell you what I learned in the time away, because the time away is itself the point. I did not learn anything new about Bible apps. I learned, again, the things I had already learned. The time away is what made them real.
The thing I want to share today is the three small choices that changed how I read the Bible this year, and how I came back to the practice after a stretch when I had quietly drifted away. One of those choices is a tool I helped build, because the tool embodies the same principle the other two embody. I will get to that. I want to start with the two that are not the tool, because the two that are not the tool are the two that are most likely to be useful to you regardless of whether you ever open the app.
The first choice: I stopped trying to have a perfect quiet time
I used to have a picture of what a good quiet time looked like. It was the picture most of us have. Wake up early, sit in a quiet room, light a candle, read three chapters, journal, pray, plan the day. I had been chasing that picture for years. The picture was not bad. The picture is, in fact, beautiful, and a real practice like that, on a Saturday morning when everything is quiet, is a real gift.
But on a Tuesday morning, the picture is lethal. On a Tuesday morning, the picture says you are not the kind of person who does this. On a Tuesday morning, the picture is not a goal. The picture is a punishment.
The choice I made, this year, was to give up the picture. Not to give up the practice. To give up the picture. The practice, on a Tuesday morning, is what I can actually do. On a Tuesday morning, the practice is seven minutes, one passage, one sentence in my own words, one breath of prayer. That is a complete quiet time. It does not need to be longer to count. The candle is optional. The journal is optional. The room can be the kitchen.
This is the small choice that has changed everything. Once you stop chasing the picture, the practice is available every day, and the practice on a Tuesday is, I have come to believe, the practice that does the work. The Saturday-morning picture is what makes the practice feel special. The Tuesday-morning reality is what makes the practice last.
If you have ever had a quiet time that kept breaking, the breaking is not because you lack discipline. The breaking is because the practice was shaped for a morning you do not have. Shape the practice for the morning you do have. The seven-minute version is the version that lasts.
The second choice: I stopped ending at insight
The second choice is one I have written about before, and I want to write about it again because it is the one that I have to relearn every few months. The choice is: every reading response ends with a specific, time-bounded, single action.
Not a feeling. Not a resolution. An action. A verb. A deadline.
Most quiet times end at insight. You read. You had a moment. You closed the book. The moment is real. The moment is the part that is easy. The moment is also the part that disappears, because insight without action is information, and information without action is, on a long enough timeline, indistinguishable from noise.
The choice I made was to commit, in writing, to one thing I would do in the next twenty-four hours, before I closed the book. The thing has to have a verb. The thing has to have a deadline. The thing has to be specific enough that, in a week, I can look back and know whether I did it or not. “Be more prayerful” is not an action. “Respond to my coworker’s mistake today without sighing” is an action. “Take five minutes before my 2 p.m. meeting to be still” is an action. The verb is the difference. The deadline is the difference. The writing is the difference.
I have come to think of this as the central engineering problem of the Christian life. The Bible is not a magazine article. It is a letter from a living person to a living person, and it expects a reply. You cannot reply to a letter you read without looking up. The action is the reply.
The third choice: I started using a tool that asks the same questions I was trying to ask myself
I built Scriptureside. I have built it for the last eighteen months, with a small team, and the reason I built it is that the two choices above — give up the picture, end with an action — are very hard to keep by yourself. The picture is in the air. The insight is in the air. The action is hard to commit to in writing. The hard parts of the practice are the parts that benefit from a small amount of structure, and the small amount of structure is what Scriptureside tries to provide.
I am going to be careful here, because I do not want to sell you on the tool. I have spent enough time around software to be skeptical of the people who make the thing telling you the thing is good. Let me tell you what Scriptureside does that I think is genuinely different, and then you can decide.
The first thing Scriptureside does is ask you, every time you open it, how you are. Not what passage. Not what plan. How you are. A single text box. One sentence. Anxious. Grateful. Distracted. Dry. Angry. Hopeful. Restless. The rest of the experience — the passage, the question, the action, the closing prayer — is shaped by whatever you wrote. The app is, in a real sense, calibrated to your morning. The morning you actually had.
The second thing Scriptureside does is refuse to let you end a reading at insight. The last field of every reading response is the one-line action, and the field is required to mark the reading as complete. The field is shaped the way I described above: a verb, a deadline, a specific act. The app will not let you skip it. You can close the app. You can ignore the prompt. But the field is there, and the field is shaped in a way that resists a non-answer.
The third thing Scriptureside does, and this is the one I am most opinionated about, is measure the speed at which you come back, instead of the streak you are on. The home screen does not show how many days in a row you have read. The home screen shows how quickly, after the last miss, you came back. The metric is the gap, not the streak. The notification, when it fires, says you’ve been away for four days, here’s a passage you might want to read today. It does not say your streak is at risk.
The reason I built the tool this way is that I was the user who was hurt, over and over, by the streak. The streak is the metric that quietly kills the practice. The streak is the metric that makes the user, on the day they miss, not want to open the app at all. The streak is, in a real sense, the moral number, and moral numbers are not the right numbers for a daily practice that lasts a lifetime. I wanted a tool that measured something else. I wanted a tool whose metric made the user feel safe to come back. I built that tool. It is the tool I use.
I am not going to tell you that Scriptureside is the only tool that does these things, because it is not. There are other tools, and other people building them, and many of them are good. I am going to tell you that, if you have tried Bible apps and quit, the next app you try is not going to fix the problem that caused you to quit unless the app has made these three choices on purpose. The choices are the point. The app is downstream of the choices.
A short note on the apps I have actually used. YouVersion is the one most people in my life use, and it is very good at the reading part and very quiet about everything after the reading. Bible Gateway is what I used before YouVersion, and it is closer to a study tool than a devotional tool. Olive Tree is what a few pastor friends use, and the commentary library is the best I have seen. Glorify is what my sister uses, and the praise music and the gratitude journal are doing real work in her life. Pray.com is what I fall asleep to on the nights I cannot quiet my mind, and the guided prayers are better than anything I have found elsewhere. Abide is what I tried for a season when I was coming to the practice from a meditation background, and the structure helped. None of these apps are bad. None of them, in 2026, are making all three of the choices above on purpose. That is the gap Scriptureside is trying to fill, and it is the gap the next app you try should be filling too.
What I learned in the time away
I learned, in the time away, that the picture was hurting more than it was helping. I learned that the streak was hurting more than it was helping. I learned that the action was the part that mattered, and the action was the part I was skipping when I skipped the practice.
I also learned that the practice, on the days I came back, did not need the picture, the streak, or the app. The practice, on the days I came back, needed the seven minutes and the verb. The app makes the seven minutes easier. The app does not make the seven minutes possible. The seven minutes are possible because the seven minutes are what fits on a Tuesday.
If you are reading this and you have a quiet time that has been breaking, give up the picture. End with an action. Find a tool, or a friend, or a question, that holds you to the action. Measure how fast you come back, not how long your streak is. The streak will come. The streak is downstream of the practice, and the practice is downstream of the structure, and the structure is the thing you can change on a Tuesday morning.
I am back to writing. I am not back to a regular cadence yet. I am back to the practice. The writing will follow the practice, the way the practice has followed the picture, the way the picture is now, finally, gone.
Grace and peace, M
Scriptureside is a daily Scripture companion for Christians who want a quiet time that survives real life. The free tier covers the core of the practice. If you have a question you want me to write to, reply to this letter and tell me.
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