I began reading the Bible for myself as a 12-year-old. I had read parts of the Bible before as a younger child and had even memorized Romans 12 as a 9-year-old boy for camp, but I had never attempted to read through the whole Bible before the summer of 1986.
It didn’t go particularly well.
I remember really enjoying Genesis and most of Exodus but things came to a crashing halt once I encountered the strange and impenetrable world of Leviticus. For the next several years I stuck largely to the books and letters of the New Testament.
I was 18 years old before I ever managed to complete the whole Bible in a year. I was amazed to realize how many stories and concepts I had never encountered before, even though I had spent my whole life in the church. There are certain passages you might hear read or taught from the pulpit multiple times in a year in a typical evangelical church: the story of the woman at the well, the story of the prodigal son, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Old Testament story of Jericho, David defeating Goliath, Moses parting the Red Sea – but you could live for a thousand years in many churches and never hear anything about the night visions in Zechariah, Jeremiah’s rotten underwear, Ezekiel’s prophetic theatre or Asa’s terrible attitude later on in life. It was finding hidden gems like those that kept me coming back for more, year after year after year.