What's wrong with me?

I have never felt the burning desire to read the Bible on an extremely regular basis.

Even when I thought that the sum total of my spiritual life hinged on my ability to have a regular quiet time, I just couldn't make myself do it.

I start. I do it for a while. I give it up.
I resolve myself. I set time aside. It gets lost in the shuffle.

I really want to know what's wrong with me. It's not that I don't like the Bible (duh!). In fact, I feel that I've learned more about what it has to say about God in the past couple of years than I have since I was a kid learning the stories in Sunday School.

But I have a lot of friends who talk about how important it's been for them to discipline themselves to studying the scriptures regularly and how they've burned for the scriptures, and it's starting to make me wonder what's wrong with me. Why am I so much more likely to pick up a book about Abraham Lincoln or Greek philosophy than I am to pick up the "good book"?

It doesn't help to see people around me practically equate the Bible with Jesus and, I believe, wrong-headedly refer to it over and over again as the Word of God. So my oppositional nature kicks in some there, and I'm sure I've got some kind of unconscious negative association with having my own time to study the scriptures.

Maybe I need to rebel against myself. What I really wish is that Christ would take this the way he has taken other personal deficiencies of mine. I want him to badly, but apparently I'm having a tough time letting it go, and I'm not exactly sure how or why, because I feel so willing.

Jeez, being a Christian can strand you in a schizic sense of being. I'm fighting myself. I'm sure plenty of people would find that unhealthy. I just keep wondering why I won't die!!!
posted by Stephen at 10:17 PM | |