My Son-in-Law Asked Me Where to Start. I Handed Him My Own Failure.
By Dale W.
Updated this week
He asked me at a cookout, standing there holding a paper plate. Said he wanted to finally read the whole thing, front to back, and where should he start.
I've been in a pew every Sunday since I was a boy. Fifty-some years of it.
So I said what everybody says.
He typed it into his phone. I remember feeling good about myself.
Six weeks later he brought it up again, sort of sheepish, and said he'd fallen off. He didn't say where.
He didn't have to. I knew where.
and called it advice.
I went home that night and did something I'm still a little embarrassed about. I walked around my house and gathered up every Bible I owned.
There were four.
I put them on the kitchen table and opened each one to wherever the bookmark was sitting. First one, an inch in. Second one, an inch in. Third, maybe an inch and a half. The fourth had no bookmark at all, but the pages told on it anyway — soft and handled at the front, crisp and untouched everywhere after.
Four Bibles. Four honest tries spread across twenty-some years. Every one of them dead inside the same forty pages.
I'd been giving that boy directions to a place I had never once arrived at.
That isn't a character flaw. That's a pattern.
Nobody ever said it to me plainly
Everyone gets handed the same instruction I gave him. Start at the beginning, keep going.
And it works, for a while. Genesis has you — creation, a flood, a man walking away from everything he owns because he heard a voice. Exodus keeps the pace.
Then, right about week three, you hit Leviticus. Grain offerings. Mildew regulations. Which threads a man is 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 tired minutes at the end of a workday cannot climb fifty pages of ceremonial law. It makes no difference at all how much you love God.
So you skip a night. Then two. Then you've lost your place. Then it's on the shelf, and the ribbon stops moving, and years later you're standing in your kitchen at midnight with four books on the table wondering what's wrong with you.
Something is wrong with the order.
What actually 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 hands me something I can use before lunch, and the New Testament reading has me leaning forward.
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 other piece I didn't expect to matter as much as it did: Dr. Charles Stanley's notes sit alongside every single reading. The hard passages stopped being something I endured 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 man back the next morning.
I called him in March
Told him to quit trying to start at Genesis. Told him it wasn't him. Told him I'd been losing that fight since before he was born and had the four books in a drawer to prove it.
Then I sent him one.
He's still going. So am I.
And I finished the entire Bible last year. Sixty-seven years old. First time in my life.
That one's 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.
More than 400,000 people own one. It holds 4.7 stars across over 2,100 reviews, and those reviews are almost entirely people describing the exact drawer I've got in my kitchen.
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 bookmark 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 whoever you've been telling to start at Genesis deserves better directions than I gave.