Two thirds of the Bible is story. And it’s good story. Have you read it? Like, you know, for funsies. Not out of obligation or guilt. It’s good stuff.
Also, if you call yourself a Christian, which a wide majority of my audience does, it’s just healthy to read what you say you believe.
But reading is hard.
I just discovered Jen Wilkin and I have been on the same page on this about the importance of reading and specifically reading the Bible for the same like fourteen year marathon. Honestly, I’m fired up about this article she recently published in TGC which she says is a rehash of one from 2012. She links to another TGC article from last year lamenting the statistics that got me fired up in grad school wanting to get a literacy endorsement on top of my Masters.
Here I am instead as a youth pastor with a doctorate in curriculum instruction desperate to get Bibles into the hands of hungry youth who want something filling.
I’ve long lamented the lack of good stories for my youth to read when they tell me about the erotica trash they’re sold as literature, and I’m working on finding better options. Unexpectedly, Shards of Silence blew me away, so highly recommend that to anyone interested in a good story that’s not caught up with smut. LIKE AN ACTUAL GOOD STORY.
Also –
ALSO,
I GREW UP IN PORTLAND.
Okay, I’m gonna take a breath here and let you all know that in a moment of passion, I let out some harsh language when I saw a non Oregon based news outlet headline that read “Man on Unicycle Wearing Darth-Vadar Mask Rides Through Wildwood Premiere Crowd.” You fools! (my original words were more degrading of their intelligence) That man is a Portland LEGEND and his name is THE UNIPIPER and he is FEATURED WITH A CAMEO IN THE FILM.
I have threads I want to weave together here, and I haven’t got it worked out entirely, but I’m fired up by the convergence of watching Wildwood, reading Shards of Silence, and then coming across the Lifeway research on biblical literacy and the experience I have with it correlating to actual literacy. We’re wired for story (I’m also reading a book on writing good novels using neuroscience and was like, duh, the Bible is 2/3 story), and the modern world we live in is so set on instant gratification, we don’t engage with long form story the same way.
Even when I write these posts, I check to make sure it’s under a five minute read – though I grant that’s something related to the genre. I wrote a whole memoir that had a lot more content.
I gave a youth group message on Friday about how we value growing together but that growth can take time. I pictures of my second favorite tree in the world to illustrate.
The one with me and Lissy was like a week before I moved, and the other one was sent to me by Chris just a couple of weeks ago. That tree has kept growing, and I wish I had a picture of it ten years ago when I moved into that house because it’s massively changed since then. As have I. But it’s the ten year lens that shows the massive growth, and the ten thousand words will always tell a richer, fuller story than just ten.
It just takes a little patience to work all those threads together. Like the Genesis to Revelation meta-narrative. Sit and soak in the Ruth narrative today, but when you get to the end, you’ll enjoy it a bit more the next time if you read Tamar’s story in Genesis 38 in between. Oh, and then notice what’s up with birthright stuff in that book and the relationship to the Moabites in the following one, and then take all that into the story of David after the book bearing his great grandmother’s name.
