If you’ve ever read anything, you’ve had this experience: You’re in the middle of the article, and all of a sudden, your mind is skipping something that happened somewhere at some other time, that has nothing whatsoever with what you’re reading. It happens, no matter what you’re reading…a school lesson, a magazine article, or the Bible.

For example, I was reading in the Bible, in the seventh chapter of Romans, where the Apostle Paul is saying, I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.” He was speaking of our weaknesses, that at times show up, no matter how we try to avoid them.

And right in the middle of my reading, I found myself thinking of an episode of the Carol Burnett Show, where Tim Conway and Harvey Korman are German officers, trying to make Lyle Waggoner, who plays an American prisoner, give them war information. Tim pulls out a hand puppet of Adolph Hitler and of course gets to ad-libbing, having the puppet sing “I’ll be working on the railroad,” running into “someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah, segue-waying into “Fe-fi-fiddly-I-Ooh.” (We sung all of it on the bus going to high school ballgames). Of course it broke up Harvey Korman…

But do you see where I’M going? No matter how you try to concentrate on a thing, your mind jumps to China or somewhere, out of control for a moment. And that’s why you can read your Bible through 15 times, and each time you’ll come upon things you don’t remember ever reading before. That’s why you should read and re-read your Bible…to get “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey would say. The Bible will even talk to you differently when you’re in a certain mood, so that a certain scripture will touch you, that didn’t seem to register at all at another time when you read it. One thing you’ll get the FIRST time, though, is right from wrong, and that you must be born again to reach Heaven.

Read your Bible. Then read it again. And try not to let distractions spoil it for you.

37BT Bill Thornton Feb 9, 2008