In the beginning... and right NOW

Welcome to the new year! This year, I will be posting the daily readings from the One Year Bible in the New Living Translation. I plan to record the readings as YouTube videos each day. I will post that link every day, so you can listen to it and/or read along. I also found a site that has the readings recorded as audio files, so I plan to post those, too. In addition, I will post my reflection each day. So without further ado, here we go.

Click Here for my YouTube video with the readings from the Old and New Testaments. Click Here if you would like to hear someone else read them, and hear their reflection.

My reflection:

Today we begin a new year with God. Many of us are committing to read through the Bible this year. As we do that, it's good to realize that these aren't just stories or words written by people long ago. They ARE those things. But they are also the inspired word of God. Which means that He speaks to US through them.

It's interesting to realize that we don't experience things as they happen. Have you ever thought of that? There is a tiny delay from the time someones says words to us, and the time it takes for the sound to travel through the air and reach our eardrums. Then it takes more time for the neural impulses to reach our brains, and for our brains to "experience" them. So we are always living "in the past", so to speak. Everything we see and hear every day, we experience slightly AFTER it happens.

Those who teach meditation teach us to follow our breath. Arguably, our breath is closer to "now" than what we see and hear, because we can ... sort of... experience it AS it is happening. So that takes us away from fixating on the future or on the past, and puts us in the NOW.

But God is closer to us than our breath. When we experience God, we know Him in the NOW. He is right here with us, teaching our spirits what is true. Sure, we're reading words that were written hundreds, even thousands of years ago. But God is right here in the NOW, speaking to our hearts what the words mean as we read them.

So as we go through the Bible this year, ask Him to speak to you right here, right now. And open your heart to His message. It will make 2018 the kind of year you've been waiting for.

God, thank You for being closer to us than our breath.