Reader Story

I Found My Father's Bible After He Died. He'd Owned It 60 Years. The Spine Was Barely Cracked.

By Robert D. Updated this week 6 min read

I found my father's Bible after he died. He'd owned it for sixty years. The spine was barely cracked.

I sat on the floor of his closet and opened it, and the ribbon was sitting maybe a fifth of the way in — right around Leviticus. Sixty years. That's as far as he ever got. And I knew exactly where he'd stopped, because it's the exact place I'd always stopped too.

My father was the most faithful man I ever knew. Never missed a Sunday. Prayed over every meal. Believed with everything in him, right to the end. And he died having never read the book he loved. He just never got past that wall. Nobody ever showed him how.

Same faith. Same good intentions. Same ribbon, stuck in the same place. And if nothing changed, someday one of my kids was going to find my Bible with the spine barely cracked and the ribbon in Leviticus, and think the same sad thought I was thinking about my dad.

I didn't want that to be the thing I passed down.

Maybe you're closer to that than you'd like to admit too. You believe. You've always believed. But if someone opened your Bible right now and looked at where the ribbon sits, what would it say about how far you've actually gotten?

For most of us who are honest, the answer is: not far. A few weeks in. The same wall, over and over, for years.

It was never a lack of faith

Here's what I finally understood, holding my dad's book. It was never that he didn't want to read it. It was never that he didn't believe enough — no man believed more. It was that he did what all of us do.

He opened to page one and marched. Genesis grabs you — creation, the flood, Abraham. Exodus keeps you going. And then, a few weeks in, you hit Leviticus. Laws about offerings. Rules about mildew and disease. Which fabrics you're allowed to wear. Page after page after page of it.

And that's where he stopped. And started over the next year. And hit it again. For sixty years. Because nobody ever told him there was another way in.

Nobody ever told him you don't have to read it in a straight line

Because there is another way in. I found it too late to give it to my father. But not too late for me.

Instead of one long march from page one, the whole Bible can be laid out across 365 days — and each day, you don't read one thing. You read four.

A short piece of the Old Testament. A Psalm. A Proverb. A short piece of the New Testament. Four small readings, every day.

On the day the Old Testament reading drops you into the worst of Leviticus — the offerings, the laws, the endless detail that stopped my dad and stopped me — it's short. A few minutes. And while you're there, a Psalm is speaking to your day, a Proverb is handing you something useful, and the New Testament reading has you leaning into something you don't want to stop. You're never stuck in the dry book, because you're never only in the dry book. The wall that stopped my father for sixty years never even gets built.

You start today — not January 1

You don't wait for a new year. You open it to today's date and read for about fifteen minutes. Miss a day, you read the next one. Nothing to fall behind on, ever. A year from the day you start, you've read the whole thing — the whole book my dad never reached.

It's called the Life Principles Daily Bible, and every reading comes with Dr. Charles Stanley's notes right beside it, so the parts that used to go over my head — and his — finally make sense. More than 400,000 people own one. The reviews are full of people just like my father: lifelong believers who never finished, except these ones did, because they found this in time.

I keep my dad's Bible on my desk now, ribbon still in Leviticus, right where he left it. And next to it, mine — and mine is moving. For the first time in my life, the ribbon is past the wall, and it's still going, and I'm going to reach the end he never got to.

When my kids find my Bible someday, it's not going to look like his. That's the thing I decided on that closet floor, and it's the best decision I've made in years.

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