Want to Read the Bible in a Year? Seven Tips to Be a Gal Who Finally Follows Through

Hey Christian girl – I see you. You’ve tried a half dozen times to read through the Bible in a year, and you have always come up short. One year you didn’t even start. Another year you got to Valentines Day, missed two weeks straight, then raised the white flag of surrender about the same time as your friends with their fitness goals gave in to the Pizza Hutt (oh wait, thats me). You really wanted to but life happened and the goal became a dusty Bible and the thoughts welled up within you: you cant, you never will, you’re not enough, only ‘super-Christians’ can do that.

 LIES!!
All lies straight from the pit of Hades.

You are enough, you can DO this, you have all it takes with God and a friend on your side, this can be your YEAR!

2015 was my year, y’all: the first time I really made it all. the. whole. way. through the Bible. And I don’t claim to have all the answers – not by a long shot. But looking back, I know what I did different that year from all the other years, and that’s what I’m going to share with you here. But first, I know what you’re thinking: this coming year isn’t going to work for me – I’m taking 18 hours, I’m having a baby, I’m moving across the country or across the world, blah blah blah. Bologna. You can either find a thousand reasons not to do something or you can find ONE good reason to do it – it’s honestly up to you. 2015 was a hard year, friend. I worked a full time job that I didn’t like, I went to school at night full time, we lost a baby, we moved… it was a doozy. But I did it, and here’s how you can too:

An Unexpected Christmas

A king, undercover, born into poverty with a master plan to save all mankind, a father who chose adoption over rejection, two parents on the run – risking everything to save their miracle child, and a courageous teenage peasant girl who showed the world that she was capable of keeping her eyes above the waves of her current crisis.

It’s a wild story, y’all. But the wildness that takes my breath away is that this first Christmas was unplanned, inconvenient, and disruptive – a far cry from most of our Christmases this year.

Halfway

Woke up
Coffee
Dogs in lap
Short drive to work
Job I absolutely love
Bills paid
Food to eat
Chai tea latte
Man to love who loves back fiercely
Community of believing friends
Justified before God through Christ

I am so blessed. 

Writing out today’s blessings makes the sorrow a little less severe. Today I was putting away new client files at work – the very same pregnancy clinic that I came to just a few months ago pregnant for the first time, scared and excited – worried yet hopeful.
Then there it was: the file containing the only earthly documents that my body ever carried life. A thin manila folder with my name typed vertically on the edge of a blue label. I sat on the stool in front of the revolving filing cabinet reading every detail of my file – all the nurse’s notes. The wonderful, kind nurse who saw my ultrasound as inconclusive but tried to explain it away. Too early. Not the right angle. Just come back in a few weeks. I didn’t have to – I knew. Somehow I already knew.

Electric Love

Oh, electricity. My thoughts about you are the reason for this gathering of all the strange. I shared my thoughts about you with a few friends, and because they prompted me to free you to live on the web, I shall.

I caution the reader that the deep and weird consumed here are devoured at ones own risk. I take no responsibility for any blown minds or eye rolls.

Want to know what’s weird?
We would probably all agree that man spent a long time without electricity. We’ve been on God’s Green Earth for a while now, but electricity has only become commonplace in the last hundred years or so since the dude with the hair got credited with the whole key / kite / lightning situation.

But I challenge you. Electricity was actually here all along just chilling (or buzzing? idk) in various places waiting to be discovered and harnessed and used to light up a half-the-time dark world. Electricity is inside us. Energy is created within our bodies by molecules and elements. Electrolytes in the heart cause it to beat. ITS ELECTRIC.

The electricity in us was bestowed upon us by our mothers while we were being formed in her womb. About six weeks after conception, our hearts started to beat. She may not have even been aware that she was pregnant and transferring energy at this point. When she gave birth not only did one person become two, but electricity was fully transferred into another separate being. Now, the child that she bore was not only her own flesh and blood – but her own electric 6lb 5oz buzzing ball of perfection.

This means that all the electric beings out there got their electricity from their mamas who got it from their mamas who eventually way back got it from Eve: the mother of all mankind. So where did Eve get it from? Well she was formed from a rib taken from Adam who was created out of dust and the breath of God. Breath. Huh. Electric breath? I dare say so.

When we discovered electricity, we discovered what was inside us all along. From the dawn of humanity, we have been electric. When we ponder electricity, we are lead back to the very God that put it there, breathed it into us, and gave women the great commission of propagating it. His electric breath is in me, and just like His Word, it pumps my heart and fires synapses in my brain. I am Him and He is me and we are one. I know electricity. I know myself. I know Him.

When I turn on an electric light bulb to cast out the darkness from my living room I remember that He is the light of the world that casts out all darkness [John 8:12]. He is electric and awesome, and I may never fully understand all of His deep and weird mysteries here on this Earth…

but I’m gonna try.