🌿Sapling 🙂Agree 🟢Conviction 📓Journal
Importance: 10%
Note
- Used as May 2025 #📃Epistle for LCOS
- Posted to Substack as #📝Essay in its current state April 2025
A Spiritual Workout
Or Tilling the Heart
Happy and Blessed Eastertide to You and Yours!
I don’t know how often this happens to other people. But for me, when I get in a particularly introspective mood, I quickly realize that there is a decent part of me that is unhinged. Out of the box ideas in particular tend to grab my attention, especially if it’s just crazy enough to work.
And so I ran across an idea: read through the whole Bible in thirty days. That’s crazy right? There is no way that’s possible… right? In my experience, most Bible reading plans talk about reading it in years - not months. Yet I found it compelling in its overwhelmingness. The first time I read through the Bible in a year successfully was in High School. Since then I have started and stopped different reading plans more than I can remember. Somewhere around the book of Numbers it’s easy to allow the busyness of life to offer an excuse to stop. Yet I have long been convicted by the words of Psalm 1:
Psalm 1:2 ESV
his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.
That kind of life permeating interaction with Scripture has always seemed to elude me. How quickly do devotional moments, or reading plans, often fade into the noise of news feeds and todo lists. So many other things fight to fill my mind constantly. And so the speed of thirty days felt kind of like a depth charge set to blow apart all the conscious and unconscious ruts and mental habits I had been inhabiting.
The insanity of the plan was only heightened by its name: “The Shred.” Being a bit of a gym rat in college and seminary, the bodybuilding term grabbed my imagination (for those who are unfamiliar, shredding is the bodybuilding practice of breaking down and hardening muscles after you’ve built them up). It sparked that kind of internal fire that makes you want to run as far as you can just to see when your legs will fail. When I came across it, I had yet to decide what I would do for a Lent, so I had a perfect excuse to try it. Mercifully, a wise friend suggested toning down the challenge a little by making it forty days with Sundays off in order to better mesh with the Lenten season. And so the “40 day Shred” was born.
It has indeed felt like shredding down my spiritual muscles. Or like running through the Bible like a maniac. Scheduling that amount of reading (especially as a pastor during lent - why am I like this) was impossible. So I leaned into cramming in reading, or listening to my audio Bible, around all the cracks and pauses in my days. Reading/listening to a chapter or two in the morning when I get to work, at lunch, and in bed at night. Listening to audio on the drive to and from work, during household chores at night, while working out, while answering emails, filling out taxes, etc…
Like I said, a nutty unsustainable pace.
Yet while I have been crashing through the Bible, I keep finding it crashing into me. The big beautiful tapestry of God’s word has been racing through my consciousness for over a month at this point. Connections and patterns have started popping out at me. I used to read and trust summaries about the Bible’s big picture, but now I have seen the flow and structure myself. I have seen how mercy and grace is always bound up with truth and judgment. How the wisdom literature balances each other perfectly. Teaching the normal workings of the world but also admitting that life is more complicated than that. Or how the laws interpret the narratives, and the poetry and prophets interpret both. The New Testament seeps imagery and allusions from the Old Testament as simple as a single word. While Jesus ushers in surprising reversals, deepenings, and expansions.
But before I ever saw any of these things, I first felt guilty. To make it through everything in forty days you don’t have time to slow down. My rational brain hated that. I’ve been so trained to analyze and ponder (both still important ways to read the Bible) that it almost felt disrespectful to read at such a fast pace. Yet something about bypassing the deep analytical side of my mind has made Scripture start to stick inside me on a primeval level. God’s word is doing what it does best, reshaping and reforming a broken human. And if this experience has taught me anything, it’s that I haven’t read my Bible nearly enough.
Jesus’ parable about the different types of soil comes to mind as a good summary of this experience. The soil of my heart is often not the good one. It has rocks and weeds. It needs to be plowed and tended. The only place to go for that kind of heart surgery is Jesus. The same is true for all of us. So maybe this Easter season you might try to “shred” through the Bible yourself. Go ahead and see what happens. It might just be crazy enough to work. Or if that makes you shake your head, let these words of Hosea help you think about what kind of soil maintenance you need:
Hosea 10:12 ESV
break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the Lord, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.