In the Home Stretch

Edited to add quote at the end of the post.

If you read here regularly, you are aware that I am reading the Bible in 90 Days for the first time.  It's also the first time I am reading the entire Bible cover to cover.  I am reading with the encouragement of Amy and the community at MomsToolbox and the accountability of my dear friend, Andrea.  While it has been hard, at times, to keep up with the readings, the truth is, overall, it has been much easier to do than I ever imagined.  Some of the Old Testament readings were dry, some were difficult to understand but I just purposed to keep reading.

Now deep into the epistles of the New Testament, I am filled with joy to have gotten so far.  The beauty and the richness and the clear theology of Paul's letters have never been more real to me, having just read through the Old Testament in its entirety!  And what I thought might primarily be an intellectual exercise simply given the pace at which I was reading the Scriptures has proved to be a deeply spiritual one as well.  Though it did not happen everyday, many times as I read I was prompted to pray for myself and others, to share a verse of encouragement with a brother or sister or simply to be a doer of the Word.

The 90 Days end on April 2nd.  I am confident that, if it is God's will, I will finish on time.  And if not, I will finish soon after.  Amy starts a new B90Days group on July 11th.  If you have never done this before, I urge you to prayerfully consider it!  There is nothing in my Christian life, besides my Baptism, that has brought me more joy than this!


After I wrote this post this morning, I picked up Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a book I am reading for Book Club at church.  Chapter Two discusses, among other things, how one should be reading the Scriptures each day.  When I read the following passage, I knew it belonged at the end of this post:

"Consecutive reading of Biblical books forces everyone who wants to hear to put himself, or to allow himself to be found, where God has acted once and for all for the salvation of men.  We become a part of what took place for our salvation.  Forgetting and losing ourselves, we, too, pass through the Red Sea, through the desert, across the Jordan into the promised land.  With Israel we fall into doubt and unbelief and through punishment and repentance experience again God's help and faithfulness.  All this is not mere reveries but hold, godly reality.  We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the holy history of God on earth. "  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 53