No Bible Reading for today. My third year of reading the Bible in a year starts tomorrow. This year I bought the ESV Study Bible to supplement my daily Bible readings. It will be interesting to hear what the “experts” have to say compared to my own interpretation. I’m also thinking about getting a Bible atlas, although with internet search I think may be able to just do a search on a region to learn about it. I was watching a documentary called Aerial Britian and I had no idea that the King Arthur stories took place in Wales. They even showed the lake where the sword was thrown into. I think I may have to plan a trip to Wales to check that lake out. I loved the King Arthur stories when I discovered them in high school. I even have a hankering to read the Canterbury Tales, which I think we read in freshman or sophomore year of high school. I remember liking them back then, which makes me wonder if I would like them now as an adult.

Maybe a fun project for me in 2024 will be read books I still remember from junior high / high school that I loved. I loved Eugene O’Neil’s Long Days Journey into Night, Flowers for Algernon, Greek and Roman mythology, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Those are the books off the top of my head. Then there’s Catch-22, Homer’s Odyssey, The Scarlett Letter, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Animal Farm.

Other new things I want to try doing for Bible reading in 2024 is highlighting. m going to highlight the passages I like in my Bible. I don’t like marking up my books, but I’m going to try it with my new Study Bible. I think it will be fun to look back a few years later to see if the Bible passage I highlighted still has meaning for me.

Another fun project would be to read a Samuel Beckett play and find the Bible refences. I really don’t remember the play we were studying when my college theatre arts professor went on that rant about how no one in the class could figure out the Biblical references or allusions. I love Waiting for Godot so it will probably be that play. 

Day 365 Bible Reading

Revelation 22: 13 (ESV)

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

Today is the last day of my 2022 Bible in a year reading plan. When I read this line from Revelation 22, I found it a fitting way to bring this year of Bible Reading to a close. When I started my journey to deepen my relationship with Christ in 2021, I received a message that I needed to read the Bible daily so I could reflect on the word of God. My first thought was cool. It has been a goal of mine since college to know the Bible inside out and out, when my Theatre Arts professor screamed in my Becket class that most of great Western Literature references the Bible in some way, and we were missing out on the references if we didn’t know the Bible. In today’s world, this would the equivalent of watching Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies and not getting all the Kung Fu movie homages. In my senior level class of 12 students who were studying the great playwright Samuel Becket that semester, none of us had much knowledge of the Bible.

So after two years of reading the Bible in a Year, I can honestly say I still don’t know if I’ll ever get all the Bible references in a Samuel Becket play. But I’m going to keep trying to read the Bible every year in a year, because if the great writers of Western Literature loved the Bible enough to put Biblical references in their works of art then it’s worth it to me so I can deepen my understanding of my favorite Western Literature writers.

And I love that I start my day and end my day immersed in activities that deepen my faith in God. God is my Alpha and Omega, my first and last, and my beginning and my end.  

 Day 364 Bible Reading

Proverbs 31: 30 (ESV)

“Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”

I love this line from Proverbs 31. I’ve met the most charming people who turned out to be total snakes and liars. These folks have so much charisma, and they hide their deceitfulness with their charm. Beauty is a complicated subject. True beauty is so fleeting and is in the eye of the beholder. It is rare for a woman not to be vain about her looks, but that beauty can be a trap. The women I know who are obsessed with their beauty pursue it more than they do their relationship with God. Most of these women are so insecure about their looks, even though they’ve been called beautiful their whole life. As a woman, I do want to be thought of as charming and of course beautiful. Who doesn’t? But for me the most important thing at this point in my life is that I want to be thought of as a devout Christian woman, who loves and obeys God.

Day 363 Bible Reading

Revelation 20: 14-15 (ESV)

“Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.”

My pastor said in a sermon recently how confident were we that our name was written in the Book of Life in Revelation. I thought about his question, and my immediate answer was Yes. I don’t know why I thought that, but that was the answer I received. I have a close relationship with God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. They have been with me since I was six years old, and although I know that sometimes I was not that close to God, he has always been part of my life. Do I often think I have disappointed God? Yes. Do I doubt God hears me and answers my prayers? All the time. But do I doubt that I have a relationship with God? Never. Wondering whether your name is written in the Book of Life is quite the thought to have on New Year’s Eve of what many are calling will be a tumultuous year of 2024. Will my faith be tested in 2024? Absolutely. Will I waver in obedience to God? Of that there is no doubt. The only thing I can be certain of is I have a relationship with God, and I work on relationship daily. And maybe that’s good enough for me in my mind to be written in the Book of Life.