Two Hundred and Fourteen Days

Cerys has a two hundred and fourteen day streak and she can tell you nothing about any of them.

The app is very good. It is genuinely very good, and I am not about to be sniffy about it. It gives her a passage, a picture, and a little line underneath, and when she finishes there is a small satisfying animation and the number goes up by one.

She does it on the bus. It takes about forty seconds, sometimes fifty if there is a long chapter, and she has learned to scroll at a speed that still registers as read.

Two hundred and fourteen.

She started it in a good week. She meant every bit of it. And somewhere around day sixty the thing quietly changed shape, and the number became the object, and now she would tell you honestly that on a bad morning her main feeling about the whole arrangement is do not lose it.

Her nan went into hospital in the March.

Cerys goes most days after college. And on a Tuesday, her nan, who is on oxygen and gets short of breath halfway through a sentence, says: "Read me something, love."

And Cerys says, "From what?"

And her nan says, "You have got it on your phone."

So Cerys opens the app. And it is Psalm 27, because it is a Tuesday in March and that is what the plan had.

And she starts reading it out loud, at bus speed, and gets four lines in and hears herself, and slows down.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?

She stops. She reads it again, slower. Her nan has her eyes shut.

The Lord is the defense of my life; whom shall I dread?

And Cerys, twenty years old, on the edge of a chair in a bay with four beds in it, hears a sentence she has technically read eleven times this year, and it goes in.

She got to about verse five and her nan said, without opening her eyes, "That is nice, that."

And Cerys said, "Yeah."

And then, after a while, "I have never actually read this before."

Now let me ask you about your own version of the counter.

It might not be an app. It might be a chapter a day because that is what you do. It might be a whole plan you are three weeks behind on and are catching up in blocks. It might be a fine leather book you open every single morning with real discipline and close again without one line having landed.

You are not lazy. Nobody keeps a streak for two hundred days by being lazy. You are just going at a speed that nothing can arrive at.

The unfolding is what gives the light

Psalm 119 is the long one, the one about the word of God, and buried in the middle of it is a line about how it actually works.

The unfolding of Your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.Psalm 119:130

Two halves, and both of them are aimed at you on that bus.

The unfolding. Not the covering. Not the passing over. Unfolding is a slow word. It is what you do with a map, or a letter, or a piece of paper somebody has folded four times, and it cannot be done at speed without tearing something.

Gives understanding to the simple. And that word does not mean stupid. It means the uncomplicated, the ones without training, the ordinary. Which is to say: it was never a comprehension problem. The light is promised to exactly the kind of person who has not studied, on condition of nothing except that the words are unfolded rather than skimmed.

So hear this said over you, streak and all. You are the sort of person this promise was made to, and the reason nothing has been landing is not a defect in you, it is a speed. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who gives the understanding, which means you have never once needed to be cleverer than you are.

Now let me say the encouraging half, because you have been quietly ashamed of this for a while.

Two hundred and fourteen days is not nothing.

You showed up. Two hundred and fourteen times you picked up a book that most people your age have never opened, on buses and in bad weeks and on the mornings when you did not want to. That is a person who wants God, and He is not indifferent to that, and I will not have you throw it in the bin because of what this article says next.

The habit is right. The speed is wrong. And of those two, the habit is very much the harder one to build, and you already have it.

Here is what changes tonight. You are going to read less and hear more.

One verse. Out loud. Slowly enough that it unfolds, and, if you can manage it, addressed to somebody who needs it rather than performed at yourself. That is what happened on the ward, and it is not a coincidence: Cerys heard it because she was saying it to a person she loved who could not breathe properly.

The Word says the unfolding gives light, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies the understanding, and neither of those has ever been in a hurry. He is not counting your days. He never has been.

Let me guard one thing, because a certain reader will over correct.

Reading a lot is good. Reading whole books at a run is good and gives you the shape of things that verse by verse never will, and plenty of people meet God at speed.

The tell is not the pace. The tell is whether anything arrives. If you read four chapters and one of them is still with you at lunchtime, carry on exactly as you are. If you have read two hundred and fourteen days and cannot name one, slow down until something lands, and then let it set the pace.

There was a man five hundred years ago who said he studied Scripture the way a man knocks apples out of a tree: shake the whole tree, then shake each branch, then each twig, then look under every leaf. That is not fast. He also said that the plainest verse, taken slowly, does more in a soul than a library skimmed.