My Granddaughter Asked Me a Question About the Bible. I Changed the Subject.
By Sarah J.
Updated this week
She was seven, sitting at my kitchen table with a coloring book, and she asked me who Deborah was.
They'd said the name at church that morning. She wanted to know.
And I sat there with my hands in the dishwater and I did not know.
I've taught Sunday school. I've brought casseroles to more grieving houses than I can count. I'm the one they call when somebody's in the hospital. In that family I am the church lady, and I have been for forty years.
So I said something soft and useless.
Then I asked her if she wanted a popsicle, and she said yes, and it was over.
That's the part that kept me up.
Because everybody believes me. Fifty years in a pew will do that. People assume I've read the whole thing, and I have let them assume it, and I have never once corrected anybody.
So that night I counted them
I went around the house after everyone left and gathered up every Bible I own.
There were four.
I set them on the kitchen table and opened each one to wherever the ribbon was sitting. First one, about an inch in. Second one, an inch in. Third, maybe an inch and a half. The fourth had no ribbon at all, but the pages told on me anyway — soft and thumbed at the front, stiff and clean everywhere after.
Four Bibles. Four honest tries across thirty-some years. Every one of them stopped inside the same forty pages.
Deborah is in Judges. I never got to Judges. I have never in my life gotten to Judges.
That isn't a character flaw. That's a pattern.
Nobody ever said it to me plainly
We all get handed the same instruction. Start at the beginning, keep going.
And it works, for a while. Genesis has you. Exodus keeps the pace.
Then somewhere around week three you walk into Leviticus. Grain offerings. Mildew regulations. Which threads you're permitted to wear.
That's the wall. And look where it sits — at the very front, before anybody has built up a shred of momentum.
Fifteen quiet minutes before the house wakes up cannot climb fifty pages of ceremonial law. It makes no difference at all how much you love God.
So you miss a morning. Then two. Then you've lost your place. Then it's back on the shelf, and the ribbon stops moving, and thirty years later you're standing in your kitchen at midnight with four books on the table wondering what is wrong with you.
Something is wrong with the order.
What finally got me through
It's called the Life Principles Daily Bible. Same complete Bible, every word of it, arranged the opposite way.
Instead of running front to back, the whole thing is laid across 365 days. And each day you read four short passages instead of one long stretch.
Watch what that does to the wall. On the morning the Old Testament portion drops me into the worst of Leviticus, it's over in four minutes — and in that same sitting a Psalm lands on whatever I'm actually carrying that week, a Proverb gives me something I can use before noon, and the New Testament reading has me leaning in.
I'm never stranded in the dry book, because I'm never only in the dry book.
No stretch is ever long enough or dull enough to start the skipping. So the wall never gets built.
The chair was already there
Here's what I want to say to the women my age reading this.
You already have the habit. You're up before the house. You've got the coffee and the chair by the window and forty-five quiet minutes nobody else in the world wants.
What you never had was a book built for that window. You had a book built for a scholar with an afternoon.
The other thing that mattered more than I expected: Dr. Charles Stanley's notes sit alongside every single reading. The hard passages stopped being something I got through and turned into something I could actually use. That's the difference between reading words and understanding them, and understanding them is what brings a woman back the next morning.
I'm sixty-eight
I did the arithmetic one morning, which I don't recommend doing often.
If I'm given another fifteen years, that's about five thousand mornings. It sounds like plenty until you remember I'd already spent roughly eighteen thousand of them not finishing this book.
I finished the whole Bible last year. First time in my life, at sixty-seven.
That copy is worn all the way through now — soft front to back, not just the first inch. Took me most of my life to own a Bible that looked like that.
And I called my granddaughter and told her about Deborah. A judge and a prophetess who led an army, and the man in charge wouldn't go into battle unless she came with him. She's nine now. She thought that was the best thing she'd ever heard.
More than 400,000 people own one of these. It holds 4.7 stars across over 2,100 reviews, and those reviews are almost entirely people describing the exact stack I had on my kitchen table.
What other people found in their houses
"I never could start in Genesis and get through. This finally let me read the whole thing. It felt like crossing a finish line I couldn't cross for twenty years."
"Four short readings a day fit the way my brain works perfectly. I never get stuck now, because there's always something else to move to."
"I'm 71. I tried my whole life to read it through and never did. I finished it this year for the first time, then turned back and started again."
Go look at yours
Go find it. Open the cover. Look at where the ribbon is sitting.
If it's near the front — and it almost certainly is — you're not the exception. You're the rule. Millions of houses, same book, same forty pages.
That ribbon was never a verdict on your faith. It's a map of where the format beat you.
And the next time a seven-year-old asks you something at your own kitchen table, you're going to want to know the answer.