reading the book of god

While I was in Tenerife last week I picked up this book which was lying around Jodie's lounge. Walter Wangerin's adaptation of the whole Bible into a novel is not a book which is easy to miss. It's fat!!

But it's also really easy to read and from the moment I picked it up on Sunday evening when we arrived to the time the plane touched down in Birmingham on Monday morning (just!) I had read almost all of it. I'm more than halfway through Jesus at the moment.

It's a great read, just in terms of re-enlivening all the Bible stories you know and filling the gaps in between them with the ones you don't, or had forgotten. There is, as you might expect, a little poetic license in parts, but even so, worth a read.

It was also, for me, a timely read. For Lent this year, I'm going to try to read the whole Bible. The real thing this time, not the American novel version. 66 books in 40 days.

I'm not alone. Michelle, Kim and Jodie are going to attempt it too. We're being realistic about it - it's more a good motivation to start with an honest admission that we almost certainly won't be turning the last pages of Revelation come Easter Sunday morning, however huge an achievement that might be. Hopefully it'll be enough of a start that I'll be able to finish the whole thing sometime in the next 80 or even 120 days. To be honest, I just need to read the whole thing. I've read lots of bits of it, most of them lots of times. But not the whole thing in one "go". So now is the time.

We found a plan which sets out how to read the Bible in 30 days (basically about 40 chapters a day) which we've (well, mostly Michelle really) modified and spread out a little bit so now it's generally a book a day, with the shorter ones clustered together. Sundays are free for catch up days and there are a few days spare at the end for extra catch up. If we stick that closely to the plan, that is.

So, all being well, by Sunday I will have read Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers.

If you want to attempt the same crazy feat, you can see the plan here. If you are going to join us, let me know you're doing it too and keep in touch!