Your time with God.

When you're learning to read the Bible, don't get hung up on what you don't understand. You will read it again and again, because there is that much depth in it.

For a long time I read 2 Timothy 4:13, where Paul asks Timothy to bring his cloak and his books, "especially the parchments," and I had no idea why it was there. Then, a little at a time, I learned. First, that Paul wrote thirteen of the letters in the New Testament. Later, that those thirteen letters aren't in the order he wrote them. This one was his last.

When I picture it now, I don't see a man with a chain on his wrist. Rome kept prisoners in a hole in the ground. I see a man alone in the dark, maybe barely able to see, cold, his race nearly run. We don't know all of it. But from there he wrote, "I suffer hardship to the point of chains as a criminal. But God's word isn't chained." And he asked for two things: something to keep him warm before winter, and something to study. When that hit me, I wept.

You can't walk through the Bible without moments like that, because it is written that way. You won't catch them every time, and you aren't meant to. A line that seems ordinary today can turn out to be beautiful, and you just don't know it yet.

If you're new, you won't see that for months or years, and that's okay. That's why the Daily Read matters. Nobody becomes a teacher of the Bible in a semester. You get there the way you learn anything deeply: a little every day, for the rest of your life.