The App That Survived My Worst October

Five years ago this month I had the worst October of my life. My grandmother died on the second. My son had a medical scare on the ninth. The project I had been working on for two years at my job was canceled on the eighteenth. By the twentieth I was not reading the Bible. By the twenty-fifth I could not remember the last time I had opened a Bible app.

I did not lose my faith. I lost my habit.

The faith came back, eventually. The habit took longer.

I want to write about what happened in between, because I think a lot of Christians have a story like this and do not talk about it. The story is usually told from the pulpit as a testimony. It is less often told from the inside as a slow, boring, twelve-month slog back to a quiet morning with a Psalm.

This is the boring version.

The first thirty days after my October, I tried four different Bible apps. Each one had a streak counter. Each streak counter reset to zero after my second missed day. The reset made me feel like I had failed something, even though the only thing I had failed to do was find ten minutes in a week where I could not find ten minutes.

I deleted all four apps around the start of November.

What brought me back was not a sermon. It was a small thing that happened in December. I was at a friend’s house for a Tuesday night dinner, and he had a Bible app on his iPad that I had not seen before. The home screen of the app asked one question before it asked anything else. How are you feeling today. There were five options. I picked anxious. The app loaded Psalm 13.

I had not picked anxious. I had picked honest. The difference mattered.

I read Psalm 13 that night. It is short. How long, O Lord. Will you forget me forever. How long will you hide your face from me. That is the first half. The second half is But I trust in your unfailing love, my heart rejoices in your salvation. It is the kind of Psalm that does not pretend the dark is not dark.

After the Psalm, the app asked me one more question. Was this for someone you know, or for you. I picked for me. The app remembered. On the way home in the car, I thought about why that question had been so short and so useful.

Most Bible apps, when you finish a reading, treat the reading as a task. Streak +1. Reading complete. Go forth and conquer. The app I was using that night treated the reading as a conversation. It did not congratulate me for finishing. It asked me whether the passage had done anything. That is a different shape of question.

I am not going to name the app, but I will tell you what it does differently and why I think those differences matter for anyone whose habit died in October and has not come back yet.

The first thing the app does differently is it assumes you will miss days. The home screen does not show a streak. It shows you what you were last reading, and the date you last read it, and a small note that says I am glad you are here. If you have been away for a week, the app does not have a sad face for you. It has the same welcome screen as someone who read yesterday.

The second thing the app does differently is it tracks return speed, not absence. After a missed day, the app quietly notes how long you were away. The next time you come back, the app offers you the same passage you read before you left. The not-quite-stated idea is that absence is recoverable, and the recovery looks like remembering what you needed before.

The third thing the app does differently is it ends every reading with a follow-up question. Was this for you or for someone else. Did this land in your head or in your chest. Three or four options. You pick one. The app remembers. On Sundays, the app shows you a small private view of what kinds of passages you were drawn to and where they landed. It is the most habit-forming feature of the app, and it is not a streak.

I have been using the app every morning for the last six years. There are weeks where I miss it. The app does not punish me for those weeks. It just opens the same question the next morning and waits for me to answer it.

I do not know if this is the right app for you. I am not affiliated with the company. I am just a person whose Bible reading habit died in a bad October and was quietly resurrected by a tool that did not treat coming back as a failure.

If your habit died in October and has not come back yet, this post is for you. It is not a sermon. It is not a recommendation. It is just the story of what helped me, in case any of it helps you.

— Andy Stanly

If you would like to see what the app looks like, it is at scriptureside.app. There is a free tier that includes the morning workflow I described.