Quiet Time with ScriptureSide

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...

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 mornin...

The kitchen light is the only one on. It is 6:12 and the coffee has already gone cold because I poured it before I sat down, which is a mistake I make most mornings and have never once corrected. I had a list. Not a written list, but a list in the way that counts: the people I was going to pray for, the thing with work, the thing with my daughter's school, the thing I have been circling for months and calling prayer when it is actually worry with the lights off. I got through maybe two minutes of it before I thought, I should probably read something first. And then I thought, no, that's cheating. You pray first. That's the order. Where the order came from I don't know who told me that. I grew up in church and could recite the right answers long before I understood them, so it is possible I invented the rule myself and then spent twenty years obeying it. Prayer first. Then the Bible. Otherwise you're just reading, and reading isn't praying, and if you read ...

The refrigerator in the house I grew up in had a magnet clip that held a stack of index cards, and every week the stack changed. My mother wrote a verse on the top card in blue ballpoint. I was seven or eight, and I was good at it. Not good at understanding it. Good at saying it. I won a plaque at a church competition once for reciting Proverbs 3:5-6 without a stumble, and I remember feeling more proud of the plaque than of the words, which should have told me something at the time and didn't. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding (KJV). That was the one. The whole stack rotated but that card came back maybe four times a year. I could say it the way you say the pledge. I had no idea what it cost. What a child thinks it means At eight I thought it meant: don't worry, God has a plan, everything works out. A kind of spiritual insurance. The verse sat flat and round in my mouth, easy to hold, easy to put down. I quoted it to a fri...

I was standing in the kitchen a few weeks ago, half-listening to a podcast, and a verse popped into my head, complete with the cadence I'd drilled into myself at age camp. "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." I said it out loud under my breath, and for a second it felt like wearing an old sweatshirt. Then I had this weird, almost guilty thought: it didn't sound like the Bible anymore. It sounded like a coffee mug. The Phrase That Lived Too Many Lives You know the verse. Philippians 4:13 . Bold letters on banners at Christian bookstores. Etched into pencils given to third graders. Written in cursive on the canvas above her desk in Survivor . It got stamped on race bibs and lifted onto Sunday school felt boards until it became a kind of wallpaper paste for whatever you wanted it to mean. Brace yourself for a colonoscopy? I can do all things. Failed the math test? Same verse. Selling a house. Coaching little league. Quitting a job. And here'...

Why I stopped tracking Bible streaks (and started paying attention to something else) For two years, every morning started with the same ritual. I opened my Bible app, hit the check-in button, and watched my streak counter climb. Day 14. Day 73. Day 217. There was something oddly satisfying about watching the number grow. I never wanted to be the person who broke the chain. And then, one quiet Tuesday morning, I broke the chain. I missed a day because my daughter was sick and I spent the morning at urgent care. The next day I was too tired. The day after that, I felt so guilty about missing two days that I avoided the app entirely. By the end of the week, my 200+ day streak was gone. What surprised me wasn't the disappointment. It was the relief. The shame loop I didn't realize I was in Here's what I noticed in the weeks after: I wasn't actually reading my Bible more because of the streak. I was reading it less . Not because of time, but because of pressure....

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 someth...