Things That Pulled Me Out Of Abject Atheism
Welcome to the next daily installment of this true story, which you can find posted here each afternoon until it comes to an end.
Chapter 81: Preparation
There are times in life when I have read the Bible for hours a day. When I do that, it builds in me such a familiarity with God, that I am unable to stop it from oozing out of me. It being: the Bible, God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, wisdom that goes beyond anything I am personally capable of, massive love that goes far beyond anything my own heart has the capacity for, and a bunch more.
There is something about the preparation work: before I leave on a trip like this, a lot of Bible time is good. By a lot, I mean, testing the limits. “A lot” is kind of a challenge that asks “How much can you immerse yourself in the Bible?” When I bring up such a challenge to God, He teaches me things about fitting the Bible into my life that I had never previously imagined.
Some people like to call the Bible the owners manual of life. That is a good statement and true, and I think there is something even more that I like about the Bible. It has an aspect of being like God’s journal. It is filled with some of God’s deepest and most sincere thoughts about us, and about His creation, and about life, and about every little detail of existence. The more you read it, the more you make sense of what God is really like.
It might not work that way once, or twice, or even three times of reading through the Bible, but I know, if you make Bible reading time a normal part of your life, that it will become something that has a great influence upon you, in ways that you cannot even imagine a book influencing you. Books can have influence, but it took me a while to understand how powerful the influence of the Bible is. It is like nothing I’ve ever seen in the realm of books. Some books I have read over and again — more times than I have read the Bible. That is not the variable. The variable is God. God is present in the Word (John 1:1).
The more time I spend in the Word before a trip like this, the more time I read the Bible, the more ready I am to be close to God, focused on God, armed with God’s perspective. I used to believe the Bible was just like any other book. I used to believe that the Bible felt stale, and hard to penetrate. I used to believe the Bible was boring.
Then I did something. I sat through a sermon in which the pastor gave eight tips to follow if you are having faith issues.
I have no idea what the other seven tips were, but the one that stuck with me was “Read your Bible more.” I never had a pastor sincerely tell me that. I can tell the difference when I read my Bible several hours a day and when I read my Bible three minutes a day, and when I do not read my Bible in a day. There is an abundance of the Bible in my heart and it crowds out all this other ungodly stuff that can creep in. It even overflows. So I read the Bible more. It helped me so much.
But then something else happened. I heard the story of a pastor who went out into the woods on vacation and had nothing but one newspaper with him. He liked reading his newspaper in the morning, so he read that one paper over and over each day. He realized that he began to know the stories quite well. By the end of the vacation, he practically had the thing memorized from nothing more than daily reading.
Eventually, it occurred to him that if that worked with the newspaper, then the same might work with the Bible. After the third time reading the Bible front to back (a process which takes only about 55 hours, thus the name for my Bible reading website 55hours.org), things started to finally click in my head. It was so hard for things to fall into place from the Bible until the third time reading it through.
That may sound like a lot. And it is. In fact, for me to read it that many times, I needed “permission” to do so. I needed someone to tell me it wasn’t weird to do. I perhaps even needed someone to tell me that it was possible. That pastor out in the woods made it his habit to read the Bible front to back every month. Every single month. Sure enough that pastor started to understand the Bible very well, much better than he already had. It is a book that rewards repetition. The Bible even says this about itself. In the very first psalm, Psalm 1:2 says to actually “meditate” on the Bible “day and night.” With the investment of about 90 minutes a day spent in reading the Bible, that pastor was able to read the Bible once each month.
I have done the same. To read the Bible over and again, and in different translations, is helpful to me. I learn so much each time through, and it especially seems to happen when I sit down and pray for understanding, for fresh revelation when I am about to pick it up, when I dedicate the reading to the Lord, when I announce that I come to the Bible to draw close to God and to know Him better. It really works. You would have been hard pressed to get me to believe that once upon a time, but then, I had that experience and it was impossible to be convinced any other way.
And you know what, I have a history of being a little bit of a slow learner. It can take me months to grasp something so simple that another person can grasp that same thing in a day. But once I learn something, I really learn it. You may not need to read through the Bible three times to start getting it. So do not be discouraged thinking that you have to go through all of that trouble to make sense of it. At the same time, I do believe that if you keep reading through it, even hundreds or thousands of times, while also coming to God prayerfully, that with every single reading you will grow more clear about God.
-Allan Stevo
This is a selection from my forthcoming book, “The Amtrak Vignettes.” A neat story began with the writing of “The Amtrak Vignettes” in October 2023. Every day until that story comes to an end, I intend to share a part of it here. It is a part of my faith journey as a Christian, a faith journey that has been deepened since the Ides of March 2020. Some of it gets pretty wild and nothing that a “reasonable” person would find himself in the midst of. Few will be scared off by it. Instead, many will grow deeper in their faith. I know that, because I know my readers well, and I know that few come here expecting me to give a milquetoast version of anything. Come here to be challenged. Stay here to have your life changed. That, I believe, is what will come of this work. You can support that work by signing up below.