"New year, new you!"
"Time for a fresh start!"
"Everything can be different this year!"
With all due respect to the people who told me those things, they are bald-faced lies. Now don't get me wrong - I firmly believe in the power of choosing to start over. However, there is nothing magical or inherently more powerful about the new year. You remain the person you were when you entered. My past has not suddenly changed or disappeared.
That being said, I have decided to make some alterations to my life this year. I'll be updating you as we go along, letting you know at least one change per week until I run out of changes. This week, that change is a book.
It's no secret that my faith has been wavering, thanks to my life circumstances. (More on that later.) But when I received The Bible in Rhyme by Kyle Holt from my mother for Christmas, I decided to give it a try. After all, it couldn't hurt, right?
Wrong. I am a poet, by both nature and schooling. The rhyming scheme (and its frequent misses) often grate on my nerves. But it's cute, fun, easy to read. I have consumed more of the Bible in the past three days than I usually achieve with the standard "I'll read at least four chapters a day" kind of resolution.
The Bible in Rhyme has also forced me to think about what I'm reading in a way that reading the standard Bible never has. The author has made a concerted effort to capture a cohesive, overarching story, which ash forced him to omit some details and to explain the relevance of stories that interrupt the overarching narrative.
Should this Bible be your only Bible? Absolutely not. However, if the original text is hard for you to get through, difficult for you to understand, or in some other way prohibitive to your reading it, give this a try. Thus far, at least, it seems to be a great way to get to know the general story without getting bogged down in difficult language, incoherent measurements, or genealogies that do not carry the meaning to modern readers that they would have to the original hearers.
What are you doing to change yourself or your circumstances this year? What do you think of New Year's resolutions?
