By Bobby Coverston

I love learning, but I don’t love reading. I most certainly can read and if I say so myself, I read very well and articulately. I have never been shy to read aloud a passage from scripture or a book. My ability to read is quite established. My speed of reading is laborious. I plod through books. I may love the content but it takes me 2-3 times longer than Harper if we are reading the same sheet of paper. I say each word aloud in my head. I add inflection and I imagine what it would sound like live or in a movie.

All of you speed readers that can skim a 200-page book and totally understand the story… I don’t get you. I may even re-read a paragraph just so I can understand its implied tone and then change the voice that I hear to reflect the newly discovered voice inflection. I even go so far as to add dramatic pauses and breaths when I read “he paused…and took a deep breath…”

I need to live it, feel it, be in it in order to understand and take it to heart. I have recently wondered if I have a form of dyslexia or something like it. It’s hard for me to follow the straight lines in the paragraphs of a book after several minutes or reading. I find myself jumping around the paragraph and piecing it together after a couple passes at it. I suppose it is no surprise that I have found much comfort and aid in audio books.

Audible.com is the greatest product the Amazon company has launched. I get to hear an actual voice with actual inflections, tone, pauses, emotions and sentiment. The result of these audio books is that I end up retaining more, understanding more, even quoting the book more.

Day 24’s reading was all about reading the Bible and how the simple act of reading it can transform our hearts, minds and lives. As you can imagine, I struggle with this one. Since I am being honest, I have never been a very consistent or “good” Bible reader. It’s hard anyways, without reading as slowly as I do. I believe with all of my heart everything that Pastor Warren was saying in this reading, and yet my heart sank a little and I found myself feeling sad. Sad for myself. I heard the voice of the liar say, “How can you blog about reading the Bible when you suck at reading the Bible?”

And then it hit me. What the enemy may use for evil, God can use for good.

You see, the Bible has changed my life and my perspective of myself, God and others. I may not be the quickest at reading through the Bible and certainly not the best at retaining or understanding all of it. But when Jesus tells the woman caught in adultery, “Who here condemns you, then neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more,” I FEEL that!

I hear his voice, compassion and empathy and it allows me to personalize it. Even as I was typing those words of Jesus I felt a lump in my throat because it becomes so real to me. Jesus does not condemn me just as he did not condemn this woman. Now I realize that not every jot and tittle of scripture is going to be so emotive, nor should it be (just read through Leviticus). But it does help me to put a voice behind those words, even when they are confusing to me, because it makes it human.

I am not the poster boy of the kind of discipline described as desirable in this reading. But I can say that the Bible is alive and active, able to cut through the messiness of life to our heart and souls. No matter how you may go about it; reading physical pages in a physical book, brail, reading digital pages on a device, listening to someone read it live, or listening to a recording through your headphones.

God is big enough and capable enough to use any of these mediums and more to reveal himself through his word. Let’s eliminate any excuse or obstacle that gets in the way of us interacting with God’s word in some way, shape or fashion, and let’s see what happens.

Bobby Coverston is music pastor at Green Bay Community Church