Recording my journey of trying to make it through life and find God, joy, purpose and meaning along the way...basically in search of eternal life here on earth.

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read between the lines

Sunday, February 08, 2009

i read the whole bible, sorta

i finished reading the (modern) bible aka. rob lacey's word on the street. whoopee. yippee. yay. except that i really began to understand what mouse, who loaned me this book, meant about the bible being difficult to read because it was difficult to follow.

especially today. imagine reading 1 john 2:9-11 (familiar to anyone who has ever heard tait say it 'live' on dc talk's welcome to the freak show) while your brother is being a real pain in the ass. and he wasn't the only family member driving me up the wall.

the past few days have been difficult in that sense. staying home due to a toenail injury (inadvertently caused by my father, which i did not blame him for) with nowhere to really sit up and rest except the living room really turned up the friction level between my family and i.

the only new thing (not something i'd never heard of before but something new enough for me not to tune out) i heard from god this week was that i need to get over my victim mentality in order to be the victor in circumstances like these. but i don't know how yet, though like always, i will leave my trust with god for the resolution to this.

back to finishing the book, which is quite a feat in itself, considering my deteriorating track record in recent years. mouse went out on a ledge by loaning me this book on his own accord, last november. (yes, this pace is considered miraculous -- haha that's how low i've sunken, from my average of three books a day back in high school.)

he decided to lend it to me after hearing my miserable tale of several failed attempts through the years to read the (actual) bible from cover to cover and never being able to get past Genesis. and now i will finally be able to say i have...with the concise, updated version of the bible anyway.

speaking of which, another challenge to finishing this book was the struggle between finishing it for the sake of accomplishment and finishing it for the sake of gaining knowledge in order to apply it. somehow or other i managed to get myself on the latter side of thinking for the most part.

i can honestly say though, that i most looked forward to reading Revelation. it was always a fuzzy book to read because the imagery used brought up a lot of unanswered questions i could never quite resolve or let go of, so in that sense it was the only book in the bible that felt relatively new (i.e. an anticipated read) to me in the sense that i had not read nor understood it as often. rob lacey's translation definitely cleared up a bit of the fog in my head.

as for word on the street sparking further and greater interest in the actual bible -- which was one of mouse's reasons for lending -- er...not to a great extent. but it really helped provide a lot of background to the actual bible, such as where some countries used to be (e.g. babylon in rome), when each book (or scroll, as rob more appropriately uses) was written and the chronology of events in each scroll.

the latter was particularly useful because one of the things that tripped me up often in my bible reading was why i found myself reading something in a paragraph that i thought already happened a few paragraphs back.

and reading poetic stuff like rob's is timely after reading an article on polarbear who was recently in the region to perform poetry slams (a rare occurrence here), including a more famous one of his titled jessica. uncanny, haha.