The Bible in 140 Characters (or Less) 

In the winter of 2010 I was looking for a Lenten discipline that would immerse me in Scripture.  I have read and studied Scripture for many years, but it's often been hard for me to stay consistent with daily Bible reading.  I like listening to audio books and decided to try an audio Bible.  After some searching I chose The Message by Eugene Peterson, my favorite contemporary version of the Bible.  The actual version I used is called The Daily Message: Through the Bible in One Year* which  breaks up the Bible into a year of listening, with one day per week off for reflection.  It's set up so that you listen to roughly three chapters per day in sequence, alternating books between the Old and New Testaments.   Each day you also hear a shorter section from the Psalms, Proverbs or Isaiah.

Around that same time I had heard about the micro blogging site Twitter and was intrigued by its growing popularity.  As a devoted technophile I was interested in trying out this new method of blogging, yet I couldn't figure out what I would I want to tweet, if anything.  So I decided to put the two ideas together.  I would listen every day to The Daily Message and I would stay accountable by tweeting my own daily reflection, in 140 characters or less.  This turned out to be harder than it seemed.  140 characters is about one or two sentences and there is often a lot going on in three chapters of the Bible.  So my commentary would sometimes summarize what was going on and sometimes just look at one thing that had captured my attention.

I found that this strange combination worked very well for me.  I stayed true to my Lenten discipline and looked forward to my daily time with Scripture.  I had fun trying to synthesize what I was listening to.  When Easter came I stopped, but I found I really missed it.  After Pentecost that year I decided to pick up where I had left off, and for the next year I kept at it.  I wasn't as scrupulously faithful as I had been during Lent, so it took me a little bit longer, but finally on August 21, 2011 I was done.  I had listened to and tweeted about every book of the Bible (except for the Apocrypha, which is not in the Message).

I have now compiled all of those tweets and rearranged them in order of the books of the classic Protestant Bible.  They form my own very personal  (and admittedly quirky) Bible commentary.  It is not meant as a scholarly work, but really as a personal devotion, a journey of discovery  into what Karl Barth called "the strange new world of the Bible." If you're interested, you can get a copy from the office or you can download it from our website.

                                                              Faithfully,

                                                                Fr. Eric

* The Daily Message: Through the Bible in One Year by Eugene H. Peterson (NAV Press, 2006)  available from Christian Book Distributors

http://www.christianbook.com/daily-message-through-bible-one-year/9781600060038/pd/06003X

Also available as an audio book on CD at Oasis Audio

http://www.oasisaudio.com/product.php?prod=9781598594577

or as a series of MP3 files at iTunes.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-daily-message-through/id364375843?mt=8

You can also see my original reflections in the order I did them on Twitter at:  http://twitter.com/revemw.

CHURCH SCHOOL -- Great Beginnings