Thirty Days in Psalm 23 and All I Got Was This Lousy Sense of Duty

The first week I underlined things. Week two, I stopped underlining and started writing in the margin — dates, mostly, like a man marking territory. By week three I was reading it the way you read a sign you have driven past four hundred times. The words were there. My eyes moved across them. Nothing caught.

I started this on a Sunday after Dana said something in small group about sitting with a single passage until it opened. She said it like a person who had done it. I have known Dana for six years and she does not say things she has not tested, so I took her seriously. I picked Psalm 23 because I already knew it. That, I now think, was the mistake.

The problem with familiarity is not boredom

I had assumed the danger was that I would get bored. Boredom you can push through. What actually happened was stranger. I kept finding things — just not new things. The shepherd. The valley. The table. The oil. Every morning for thirty days I arrived at the same six verses and every morning they were the same six verses, and the whole time a small voice kept saying you already got this one.

I have read the Bible long enough to know the standard advice here. Read it slower. Pray before you read. Try a different translation. I did some of that. I opened the King James one morning out of something close to spite, because it was the only lever I had not pulled, and it is a good translation and it did not fix anything. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. Same psalm. Same me.

What I noticed, somewhere around day twenty-two, was that the staleness was not in the text. It was in what I was asking the text to do. I was asking it to surprise me. I was reading it like a man checking his inbox, hoping for something addressed to him personally, and when nothing came I logged the session and moved on. That is not reading. That is a transaction I had been running for years without noticing.

What the thirty days actually produced

Almost nothing, is the honest answer. No breakthrough. No morning where the room went quiet and a verse lit up. I am tired of pieces that pretend that happened. It did not happen.

What did happen is smaller and harder to write about. Somewhere in the last week I stopped expecting the psalm to perform. I would read it, sometimes badly, sometimes while checking the clock, and the words would sit there being what they are. Six verses about a shepherd. I did not need them to be more than that. I needed to stop needing them to be more than that.

There is a line in Psalm 119 that I have quoted too many times to feel much about: Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path (ESV). A lamp does not show you the whole road. It shows you the next step, and then it is still just a lamp. I think I have spent years wanting a floodlight and calling the lamp a disappointment.

I am not going to tell you to try this. A month on one psalm is not a technique. It might be the wrong shape for you, and if it produces nothing it may be that the plan was wrong and not you — I believe that more than I believe the other thing. What I would say is that the dryness is real and it is not always a signal. Sometimes it is just what obedience looks like in a tired season. I am in one of those. I read anyway. Some mornings that is the entire content of my faith.

Rachel asked me last week whether I actually enjoy reading the Bible or just feel bad when I do not. I did not have an answer. I am not going to invent one here.

What have you been reading that has stopped giving you anything — and what would it mean to keep showing up anyway?

— Andy Stanly