Everyday rhythms and hearing God
A few months ago, closer to the beginning of the quarantine, Ryan challenged me to 50 books this year. That’s right, 50.
Around the same time he extended this challenge to me, I made a list of all the books I’ve collected over the years but never read, and oh boy, was it a longer list than I thought it would be.
Thus, the challenge became a challenge to myself, to read as many books from the list of books on my bookshelf I hadn’t read yet this year.
(Sidenote: The list referred to above does not include any unread e-books on my kindle or audiobooks on audible.)
I’ve always been a bit of a book hoarder, but the problem got really bad a couple of years ago. When we moved to Virginia I sorted all my books into two piles: those I might read again or are too difficult to part with, and I’ll never read this again and I’m okay not owning it anymore.
After this exercise, I truly felt good about my choices, having given away a considerable number of books that just didn’t make the cut. But writing down all the unread, physical books on my bookshelf that remained after the purge was eye-opening.
In case you didn’t catch on to it yet, I’m one of those people who buys books with the best intentions. I genuinely want to read it.
But I also want to read about 30 other books too. Genuinely.
This new practice of writing down the unread books and scratching a line through each one as I read them has not only helped me read a lot of good books, but it’s helped curb the habit of feeling compelled to buy every book recommended online.
There are so many books that come out every year month, and like someone addicted to buying shoes, alcohol, or cigarettes my fingers itch to hold the new book in my hands.
As another exercise/clearing of clutter screenshots on my phone I made a list of all the books I wanted to remember and potentially read eventually.
If I thought the previous list of unread books, I own was big, this list was like parking an Aston Martin next to a Nasa spaceship.
This list was five pages long, each holding about 41 book titles. I’ll let you do the math while I pretend not to notice how big that number is. (In comparison, my unread book list is 43, but this also includes a couple of books that came from Ryan’s bachelor bookshelves.)
You might be wondering now how in the world am I ever going to read that many books and how will I fare in the 50-book challenge being only halfway through with three months left in the year.
Well, the biggest part of that equation is I read every day, twice a day in the morning and evening.
I typically read two books at the same time, a nonfiction in the mornings and a fiction before bed.
My morning reading hasn’t been quite as consistent as I’d like it to be in the last couple of weeks as Owen transitions away from his pacifier at night and during the day. Plus, getting up before the sun is hard, no matter how much sleep you got the night before.
What has remained consistent is my bedtime reading. I keep a book on my nightstand and try to read about two chapters, depending on their length, each night before closing my eyes to sleep.
Beginning and ending my day with reading has become a life-giving practice and one which I look forward to every day.
Keeping my fiction reading to bedtime makes it easier to want to stop whatever I’m doing in the evening to go to bed, as well as helps my mind relax from any work still swirling around my brain when I lie down.
Over the last two months I began an unintentional series in my fiction reading covering World War II, a time period I’ve always enjoyed learning about.
It seems there are endless angles from which to learn something new about this time period.
I began with War Brides by Helen Bryan, My Mother’s Secret by J. L. Witterick, and ended with Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.
I feel like I could write an entirely separate post about Anne Frank’s diary and the correlations I saw to our world today, but I’ll save that for another time.
What I’m learning as I go through my list of unread books is even in something as trivial as what I’m reading right now, God has a hand at work.
There are books on my shelf that I look at and want to read, but something holds me back. I’ve experienced that feeling over and over again, and once that feeling turns into it’s your turn now, I understand.
To give you a concrete example of this I’ll tell you about reading Maria Furlough’s Breaking the Fear Cycle: How to find peace for your anxious heart.
I had this book for a couple of months before Owen’s birth, but each time my eyes glanced across the cover I felt something nudging me in a different direction. I still wanted to read the book, but it just wasn’t it’s time yet.
After Owen was born and I picked up the book to finally read it, I understood why the Holy Spirit pushed me toward other things. The message in the book wouldn’t have reached ears primed to hear it if I read it too early.
How do you feel God using your everyday rhythms to speak to your heart?
