My New Year’s resolution

Parents and grandparents, be very careful what you say to your children and grandchildren. You never know what little tidbit is going to stick with them and have a big impact on their lives.

For about thirty years, before she passed away in 1989, my grandmother lived by herself—a widow—in a small house on the top of a large hill in the middle of nowhere in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. (The photo you see is Grandmom at my wedding in 1988.) She was a dedicated Christian woman, and a great cook. I have fond memories of spending Thanksgivings at her house with all of my cousins, playing on the hill and eating all of her apple, blackberry, cherry, and other pies. At other times she would spend all day making perogies—a Polish dish that was a family favorite.

On one visit to Grandmom’s house, when I was about twelve, I was snooping around in her living room, and I saw a big book opened up, written in some unrecognizable foreign language. Unbeknownst to me, she was watching me, and noticed my bewilderment at the book. She told me that it was her Slovak Bible. She was born to parents who had come to America from Eastern Europe, so she knew Slovak.

What she said next has stayed with me to this very day. She said that she had read through the Bible each year for thirty-seven years, and this year, for a change of pace, she was reading through the Bible in Slovak.

Now, as a pre-teen, and even in my teenage years, I did not give the comment too much thought. But in my twenties, I began to try to read the Bible all the way through. Every year I made a New Year’s resolution to read my entire Bible-In-A-Year. I think there was one year when I made it to the end of January before quitting. In other years, I don’t think I even made it to January 15th. With each year’s failure, I began to give more and more thought to Grandmom’s incredible testimony. How in the world did she do it? I couldn’t even make it through the Bible once, let alone thirty-seven times.

When I hit my mid-thirties, still failing every year, a significant thought dawned on me. I calculated that when Grandmom told me about her Bible reading, she was about seventy-four years old. “If that’s the case,” I thought, “then she didn’t even make it through the Bible for the first time until she was about thirty-seven!” There was still hope for me!

In 2004, I received one of the best presents I’ve ever gotten. For my birthday, my wife gave me “The Bible on CD.” I started listening to it while commuting to and from work. I figured that if I wasn’t going to read the Bible all the way through, I could at least listen to the whole thing.

Well, guess what? I listened through the entire Bible for four years in a row, 2005 to 2008. It’s not easy, because the Bible is a long book (64 long CDs in the version I own). And there are certainly stretches of the Bible that are difficult to get through. But I have come to two very important realizations. First, once I got through the Bible the first time, doing it again wasn’t nearly as hard. Second, the more I listen to the Bible, the more interesting it becomes. Even many of the “boring” stretches have become a lot more intriguing to me.

Now the bad news. In 2009 I didn’t make it. So, my New Year’s resolution in 2010 is to get back on the wagon and listen to the entire Bible once again. I am very excited about doing so.

Oh, and there’s one more thing. As a seminary student who feels God’s call to teach the Bible vocationally, I am learning Hebrew and Greek, the original languages in which the Bible was written. As such, I will be studying and reading the Bible in those languages for the rest of my life. My eventual goal is to get to a point where, instead of reading or listening to the Bible-in-a-year in English, that I will do so in Hebrew and Greek. Maybe I won’t be able to get there for another twenty years, but that’s my goal.

Impossible, you say? Well, I’ll tell you, sometimes when I feel a little overwhelmed with my biblical studies, or wonder if I will ever master Hebrew and Greek, I’ll think of Grandmom, sitting at the table all by herself up there on top of that hill in Pottstown, faithfully reading her Bible, year in and year out, in English and in Slovak. She probably didn’t think too much of it when she told me about her Bible reading and her Slovak Bible, but it has had in indelible effect on my life, and has been a huge encouragement to me in my journey of learning to be faithful to God’s Word.