Nine Times Through the Book

Nine. She could tell you the years, because she writes the date inside the back cover each time she finishes.

The first one took her nineteen months and she was thirty one. The fastest was the year her husband was between jobs and they read it out loud together in the evenings, which she still says was the best year of her life. The most recent finished in March.

She is not showing off. If you asked her she would go slightly pink and change the subject, because she genuinely does not think it is remarkable and she has never once mentioned it at church.

She reads it because it is what you do. Because her mother did. Because the day has a shape with it in and no shape without it, and she is up at six anyway.

Here is what she has never said out loud, to her husband or to anybody.

In nine complete passes through that book she cannot remember one time when a verse turned round and addressed her.

She has learned enormous amounts. She could hold her own with anybody on Judges. She knows the shape of Isaiah and where the seams are. She has been genuinely moved, many times, by the sheer scale of it.

But addressed, in the way people describe when they say a verse jumped off the page? Not that she can recall. And she has begun to wonder, quietly, at about half past six in the morning with the book open, whether that happens to a certain kind of person and she is simply not that kind.

The ear is wakened, and it is God who does the waking

There is a line in Isaiah that is spoken by somebody describing his own mornings, and the verb is not his.

The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.Isaiah 50:4

He wakeneth mine ear. Twice in one clause, that verb. Not I incline my ear, not I train my ear, not I discipline myself to listen. He wakes it.

Which puts the hearing on His side of the table and takes it off yours entirely.

And notice the rhythm attached to it. Morning by morning. Not once in a lifetime at a conference. Not on the good days. The ordinary repeated arrangement of a person who gets up early, which is precisely what you have been doing since you were thirty one.

Your ear is wakened by God Himself, morning by morning, and it has never once depended on you being a certain kind of person. That is what the word actually says, not encouragement I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One doing the waking in a kitchen at half past six.

Nine passes is not the wrong thing

Now let me say the plain thing, because a message like this one could easily make a good woman feel foolish about the best habit she has.

Those nine passes are not a mistake and I would not take one of them off you.

You know that book. That is not nothing, and it is not dry information either. When something eventually is said to you, you will recognize its voice, because you've spent nine years learning how He talks. People who have never read it through struggle to tell His voice from their own precisely because they have no ear for the cadence.

You have the ear. What you have not had is the waking.

And nothing you have done has kept you from being addressed. Scripture puts the waking of an ear in God's hands and the reading in yours, and the Holy Spirit has never once graded a woman by whether a verse leapt at her.

Slow down until it can catch you

Here is the practical piece, and it will feel wrong for about a fortnight.

Read four verses.

Not a chapter. Not the day's portion. Four, out loud, slowly, and then shut the book and sit for two minutes.

The reason is not that covering ground is bad. It is that a plan measured in chapters trains a person to move, and a sentence that wants to catch you needs you standing still long enough to be caught. Nine passes have made you very good at traveling.

You are able to be stopped by one sentence, and being stopped is not a lesser way of reading. He promised to waken an ear morning by morning, and the Holy Spirit is the One who slows a woman down long enough for a verse to reach her.

Keep the plan. Finish the tenth. Just start the morning with four verses said out loud, and give Him two minutes on the far side of them.