I Wonder What…

Curios­ity is the best moti­va­tor. That is what drove me through twenty-five years of col­lege. I did not get my first degree in Bible in order to be a min­is­ter. I got it out of sheer curios­ity. Min­istry became a sort of log­i­cal call­ing along the way. Every sub­ject mat­ter over the next cou­ple of decades were dri­ven by that same curios­ity. I have all sorts of unfin­ished degrees in every­thing from phi­los­o­phy and coun­sel­ing to nurs­ing and polit­i­cal sci­ence. No, there are no regrets for not fin­ish­ing those degrees. They were pri­mar­ily just scav­enger hunts through the halls of acad­e­mia.
Bible study is pretty much last on the list for most Amer­i­cans. The fam­ily Bible on the cof­fee table is a tra­di­tional place­ment. No one really knows why it is there, and it is usu­ally in an older trans­la­tion that is almost unread­able. I guess it is there to sort of ward off evil spir­its or some­thing sim­i­larly super­sti­tious.
The ques­tion that will drive you into a life­time of Bible study has to do with an almost mor­bid curios­ity about how ancient peo­ple saw God — or what they believed to be God. You may find all of the very bloody bat­tles quite repul­sive. You may find the expres­sions, names, and lit­er­ary styles strange. Still, your curios­ity can keep you going. It is not that a per­son some­how “learns” the Bible — like you would mem­o­rize a poem. No, it is more like dig­ging through an old attic or base­ment — look­ing for clues to the unseen force that makes things go bump in the night.
I won­der how God inter­acted with those peo­ple? That is the first ques­tion. The sec­ond ques­tion is: I won­der what Deity is doing now? Keep those two ques­tions in mind and see where they may lead you. Make it fun. It is not a task. It is a strange quest. Begin with “I won­der what…” and go from there.