At one of the lowest points in my life, I started reading Job. I can’t remember exactly how far I got or why I stopped reading. Maybe it was too depressing, considering all that was going on in my life. Maybe I just wasn’t used to reading my Bible outside of church. Maybe on some level, reading through Job’s frustrations made me all the more impatient about my own. I would read through his questions and cries to God, feeling his desperation for the resolution as I felt my own. But as his confusion and suffering dragged on, and on, and on…maybe on some level I wondered if that was what the Lord had in store for me, and it became too much to bear.
And besides the gravity of it all, I struggle like everyone else does through a text written in the voice of a medieval bridge troll that’s telling a riddle.
It’s not like I gave up on reading my Bible altogether after that, but I didn’t get consistent about it until I decided to spend 10 minutes studying scripture for every 30 minutes I spent in the gym.
And even then, it wasn’t a habit that came naturally to me. It wasn’t something that I looked forward to, or that I particularly enjoyed in all honesty. A lot of the time, it didn’t seem like I was getting much out of it. I didn’t close the Bible feeling like I’d learned something valuable or grown closer to God.
It felt like homework.
But I did it anyway, because I knew I was supposed to.
I knew that instagram reels and rambling to God in the shower wasn’t enough.
I knew that if I really wanted a relationship with Him – one that was strong, and grounded, and didn’t depend on my mood or my circumstances, there was no way around it.
Sometimes I would procrastinate. Sometimes I would feel like my brain was atrophying as I tried to understand awkwardly translated Old English, when I’d rather just veg out and watch tv. Sometimes I would find myself glancing at the clock, hoping the time I’d allotted for it was almost up.
But after a certain point, things began to change.
I wish I could explain what happened, or when, but I can’t.
I started reading longer than I “had to” based on my workouts. I’d randomly find myself reading in my downtime, despite having already fulfilled my self imposed “assignments.” I began turning to the Word, not from a sense of obligation, but because I knew it had something to offer.
I began to hear God speak directly to me in ancient stories that took place halfway across the globe, that once seemed utterly irrelevant.
I saw my struggles, my flaws and my failures in pages and people that I never expected to. But more than anything, I saw my merciful, kind and loving Father for who He really was.
I think reading your Bible – along with a lot of other spiritual disciplines – is a lot like starting a fitness journey in more than one way.
When you first start exercising, it’s intimidating. You don’t know how to use the machines. You’re constantly sore. You dread it.
When you initially try to clean up your diet, it can feel overwhelming. It can be expensive, exhausting, and feel borderline impossible. It seems like you’re spending more time, money and effort on meals that taste worse.
And for a long time, you’ll probably feel like you’re putting more into it than you’re getting out of it. You’re lifting weights, you’re eating real food, you’re controlling your portions – and you have nothing to show for it.
Day by day, it doesn’t feel like anything’s different.
But if you stick with it, one day, everything is.
Suddenly, your clothes are loose. Suddenly, you have muscle where you used to have fat. Suddenly, you want to show off what once made you insecure. And you’re as transformed on the inside as you are on the outside.
The gym doesn’t make you miserable anymore. You might not always look forward to going, but you feel great when you leave. It’s a part of your routine, and if you go too many days without it, everything feels off balance and out of whack. You stop craving junk food, and on the off chance you indulge, it doesn’t taste the way it used to. You actually prefer meals designed to nourish you as opposed to hijacking your nervous system.
Reading your Bible can be just as painful and slow of a process.
But the result is even more rewarding.
Growth in faith, like growth in strength, often happens in silence, in repetition, in small decisions no one sees. You don’t always feel it. You don’t always recognize it in the moment. But day by day, word by word, He’s shaping you.
It went from something I was forcing myself to do, with no identifiable benefit, to the reassurance I’d been so desperate for.
It wasn’t a random collection of anecdotes or lists of rules authored to repress me, but the greatest love letter ever written, revealing a Creator with endless compassion for His creation.
While the Bible never explicitly spells it out, I think He gives us laws, and tells us how to live not at random, on a whim or arbitrarily, but because He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows our sin destroys us, and tells us to choose life – but never forces us.
And He knows that even with the best intentions, with hearts surrendered to Him, we will still fail Him, and still, He forgives us.
And the more time you spend in God’s Word, I think the more you understand Him, and the more intimately you can know Him.
Reading your Bible is like joining a gym because the advantage never immediately materializes. But it’s also like joining the gym because it can’t really heal you with haphazard commitment.
There are people that will get on the treadmill for 15 minutes once a week, pay no attention to ingredients, eat 3000 calories in snacks alone, and wonder why the scale isn’t moving.
In the same way, some Christians will pick up God’s Word on their own accord sporadically and aimlessly, and wonder why it isn’t resonating.
I’m not trying to shame anyone – we all have to start somewhere, and I’ve definitely been there. Until this year, I could go months without cracking open my Bible. Even now, I don’t always hear angels sing when I open my Bible. I don’t always walk away with goosebumps or clarity or peace.
But something that I’ve noticed is that while obedience is rarely gratified the way we’d imagine, with some kind of dramatic, obvious indicator from heaven, it somehow always works in our favor — even if it takes time to see.
All things worth doing require investment. You can’t put 1% of your time into reading God’s Word expecting to fully comprehend it or a complete metamorphosis.
Reading the Bible can be boring, academic, and even draining. But it’s one of the most worthwhile endeavors you could ever take on, and even when it feels like nothing’s happening, something always is.
Maybe silently, maybe subtly, maybe slowly. But it’s in the gradual and unglamorous where God often meets us to do His most important work, and lay the foundation for who He’s called us to be.
Spending time in the Word of God invites the Author into our lives, and even if it seems like you’re being ignored, He always responds in His perfect timing.
what do you think?