The Pages I Turn Past Without Noticing

I was looking for something else entirely — a verse I half-remembered, something about wings — and I found the list instead. It was in the back of a notebook I have been carrying around for two years. Eight references, in my own handwriting. Some of them I had underlined twice.

I had no memory of making it.

That is the part that bothered me. Not that I keep a list of passages I avoid. That is reasonable. Everyone does. The bother is that I made the list and then forgot it, which means the avoiding had already become automatic. You do not need a list of roads you take without thinking.

What the list says when I read it cold

Here is the kind of thing on it. The sermon on the plain. The end of Matthew 25. Most of James. A stretch of Romans 9 I have read maybe four times in fifteen years and understood none of them.

I want to be honest about why each one is there, because the reasons are not the same.

Matthew 25 is there because I disagree with how I have heard it preached, and I have not settled what I think instead. James is there because it reads like a list of things I am not doing. Romans 9 is there because I open it, read a paragraph, and close it with the same feeling I get at the end of a movie where everyone was speaking a language I do not have.

The first two are avoidance. The third is something closer to grief.

I got tired of the standard advice about this. Push through. Read the hard parts. There is a kind of person who hears that and feels corrected by it, and I am not that person. I have pushed through things and mostly what I got was a resentment I had to carry for a while. So the list stayed.

What actually changed

What changed was smaller than an insight. I started reading the list out loud.

Not the passages — the list. Eight lines, in the back of a notebook, before I read anything else. Just so I could not pretend to myself I did not have one. I did this for maybe three weeks, and then one morning I read them and something in me did not bristle the way it usually does. I read James 1:22 and it said, But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves (ESV).

I did not feel accused. I noticed, instead, that the verse assumes a person who has heard and not done, and is still in the room. That is the whole letter, really. It is written to people like me, not against them.

I have no great lesson from Romans 9. I still do not understand it. What I stopped doing is pretending it is not there, which turns out to be most of the work. I spent years not-reading a passage while telling myself I had read it, and the not-reading was the part that was costing me something.

Ruth told me once that the parts of the Bible she skips are the parts she is most afraid to find out she already believes. I did not argue with her. I never do. But I have been turning it over since, and I think she is closer to it than I wanted to admit.

I do not have a fix for this. I still have the list. Some weeks I read from it and some weeks I do not. What I have is less pretending and more honesty about the shape of the thing, which is not the same as progress but is closer than I used to get.

So I will ask you plainly, because I have been asking myself. What is on your list — and have you looked at it recently, or is it in a notebook in the back of a bag, in your own handwriting, waiting?

— Andy Stanly