We Need to Be Reading the Bible Everyday

In late January of 2024, my wife had a miscarriage after the birth of our first son. It was a very challenging time, more so than I had ever imagined it would be. There is the initial excitement of finding out that you are pregnant and all of the wonders and dreams accompanying it. When is the due date? Are we having a boy or a girl? What should we name this child? I wonder what this child will look like. What will be his or her personality? How do we need to start preparing the house and getting everything ready? How will Joseph (our firstborn son) react to having a sibling? When do we start telling people we are pregnant? There is the rush of excitement and nerves and everything that comes with it.

And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, something is wrong and you realize you may be having a miscarriage. You worry and you pray. You ask others to pray. And you sit and wait. Eventually to find out that you are indeed having a miscarriage, and you will never get to see your baby this side of heaven. All of the dreams and wonderings you have been having suddenly come crashing down. You start to ask yourself so many questions. What did we do wrong? Did we do anything wrong? You analyze all of your past actions. What if this happened because we did this? What if this happened because I did this? Is there something wrong with one of us that caused this? Then the worst question of all comes: What if we are never able to have a baby again? We were so thankful to have had Joseph and he would have been worth everything, but we also had dreams of a big family and a house full of many children.

I have spent a considerable amount of time reading, studying, and praying with Scripture and I was thankful for that in those moments following the miscarriage. Praying was hard and I didn’t have the words to say. But one passage immediately came to my mind following the miscarriage: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!” (Job 1:21). I didn’t know what you think or say but I knew that line and I kept saying it over and over again. I prayed it, I consoled my wife with it, and I reminded myself of it time and again. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, blessed be the name of the Lord. These words calmed me and gave me great consolation during the months after my wife’s miscarriage. It reminded me of the story of Job and God’s great providence in our lives.

Having a strong and firm Biblical foundation is essential for the life of the disciple. One can have a powerful encounter with Jesus Christ and therefore become a disciple without much knowledge of Scripture, but one cannot stay a disciple without such a foundation. It is simply not possible to put on the mind of Jesus and see the world the way that he does without being firmly entrenched in Scripture. A Biblical foundation does many things for our lives as disciples and ideally, it should give us the words and thoughts that start to come naturally to us. St. Paul tells us to “be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another [in] psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:19). This may strike some people as overly flowery language or as idealistic religious jargon, however, I think St. Paul is conveying a deeper truth here. The person who submerses themselves in Scripture regularly will start to naturally use Biblical language as their own.

I am reminded of Psalm 42:

As the deer longs for streams of water,

so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, the living God.

There are many reasons why so many in the West today cannot relate to these words, both Christians and non-Christians. I suspect at least one of those reasons is a lack of Biblical literacy. How can someone know the feeling of the souls longing for God without ever hearing such words? To reflect upon and repeat these words ourselves, we first need to hear or read them.

It can be intimidating to think about reading the Bible. It is so long, where do I even start? With these questions, I always like to point out that there are 260 total chapters in the New Testament and each chapter only takes a few minutes to read. This means that if you only committed to reading one chapter of the New Testament each day (2-3 min worth of reading) in about ¾ of a year from now, you would have read the entire New Testament. Imagine being able to look back a year from now and know that you have read the entire New Testament. That is very simple and anyone, no matter how busy they are, can commit to that. Once that happens, I have found people are more confident to then go on to the Old Testament. Once this daily reading becomes a habit, then it becomes easier to read longer passages. As the years pass, you will find yourself having read the Bible every day and multiple times over.

Matthew Kelly makes a striking point when he asks us to reflect on the moment of our death and meeting Jesus face to face. What will we say to Jesus when he asks if we ever read the Bible? We had plenty of time to read all these other books and watch all the newest shows on Netflix, but we didn’t have time to read the one book about his life?