In one way or another, we all have a different routine at the moment…call it our COVID-19 routine. For some, we may have more time on our hands (no sports, no meetings or social gatherings, no work commute, or maybe even no work); for others, our daily routine is way different (facilitating kiddos home from school, working from home, etc.). For all of us, our time is different. We are all finding ourselves in a bit of a forced sabbatical. Of course, it’s not necessarily a fun sabbatical. Yes, a break in busyness is a relief, but this break comes with anxiety and unknowns that make it hard to settle into any true rest.
So, I have an invitation to extend. Actually two. The first is kind of broad: Let’s feel this COVID-19 experience. Absorb it. Let’s not distract our way through this, which is very tempting. This might sound a bit scary but we do have solid bedrock to lock on to, which leads to the second invitation, which is more specific, and may help with the first: Could this be an opportunity to create a craving for a life-giving discipline that you know you need but that gets squeezed out of your daily line up of tasks because of life busyness? Maybe it’s exercise. Better nutrition. Practicing solitude. Or, meaningful Bible time. As you might guess, that last one is what I’m inviting you to, to lean into such a weird time as this, to listen, to feel, to hear what God is saying. And ultimately, to build a dependence on God’s Word that would have otherwise not happened. To help redeem this weird time that we find ourselves in, I’d like to invite you to this journey with me.
Along the way in my faith journey years ago, I developed what I think is best described as a craving for Scripture. This is a bit miraculous in that I spent my high school and college years as a “minimum amount required” type of reader and traveled deep into my adult life as, at best, a casual reader. One of the tools that God used to great benefit in my life was a self-created study that I did of Scripture passages that refer to God’s Word. I was curious about what God’s Word said about God’s Word…the Word on the Word if you will. And I wanted to go deeper than the more famous passages that are easy go-to’s. Using an early version of Bible software, I did some searching and found dozens of passages representing hundreds of verses in nearly every book of the Bible. I compiled those passages into a WordPerfect document (yes, it was THAT long ago). I grabbed a few highlighters and colored pencils and dug in over a period of several days. I was hooked.
I have kept track of that exercise, I’ve trotted it out from time to time, and I’d like to make that my first “gentle exercise,” as I’m calling them, with you in this journey. You can expect 10-ish gentle exercises. The document, which is here and below, is a cross-section of passages from that first self-created study. I hope these passages do for you what they did for me.
Prayers!
Gentle Exercise 1: The Word on The Word
Get all the gentle exercises, so far, here.