The podcast you were about to see, listen to, almost didn't happen. I had more trouble with this one than probably any that I've done since my first try. All kinds of tech issues and especially the Wi-Fi at the ranch was not letting me upload. And all of that was a problem because I really wanted to get this one off by the first Friday of the year. There's always this thing, the beginning of the year is like a blank canvas and you're thinking about New Year's resolutions and I really wanted to talk to you about mine, invite you into it with me the goal of reading through the Bible this year. So that's what you'll be hearing about in the podcast. I didn't make it by January 1, I didn't make it by the first Friday of the year, but it occurred to me that I'm getting this out, fingers crossed, by Epiphany January 6. I just came from church and I'm wearing my gold and feeling very Epiphany-ish, if that's the word. The celebration of Epiphany is older than the celebration of Christmas. So as you go into this podcast and think about Epiphany, which means God revealing himself, I want you to hold on to the word behold. You're going to be hearing more about that in the podcast. And so let me give you a scripture to kick us off, a classic Epiphany scripture, Isaiah 60, a rise, shine for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth and thick darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you. His glory will appear over you, nations shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn. I hope you enjoy the podcast. Happy New Year. Welcome to 2025 into my podcast, Living at the Edge of Art. I'm Stella. And I'm here once again at the Body Pokey Stinging Ranch, which is living up to its name. I got stung by a bee last week and it still hurts. I have learned to always check my shoes, check the garage door before I grab it and open it, but I had not thought to check the doorknob before I grab it and there was a bee there. So I hope that you are having as exciting and an eventful 2025 as I am. A lot has been happening just in a few days, hasn't it? One of the big things for me today is our expansion here at the ranch has begun. They're digging trenches for plumbing for another bathroom and we'll be laying a foundation soon. That's pretty exciting. That means that we had to spend Christmas break emptying out this place, kitchen and all the stuff we accumulated and this was a place where we would bring like all the old broken ugly stuff to the ranch house. And so I've been doing a lot of cleaning out and getting rid of things. Maybe you've done some of that too. So now I'm looking to the new year to 2025 and thinking about what it's going to look like for me, realizing that things aren't happening the way I thought they would, but I'm waiting on God and I thought what is the most important thing that I can do this year to move my life forward, to live faithfully, to keep striving for art and perfection in my life? I heard somewhere that the two most important things that you can do, the things that will determine what your future looks like in the coming year or the things you read and the people you surround yourself with. And maybe as you think back at your life, you think about periods and who you were with and what you were learning. And so that was a thought provoking thing for me. So I thought the most important thing I can do this year is once again read through the Bible. And so that's my plan. I want to tell you about it. So I mentioned on this podcast before that I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church from childhood until about junior high. And one of the things that sort of in the background of the Catholic Church is the understanding that we read scripture together as a community which is really important and that we read with the guidance of people that are wiser. And so it was really the Protestants during the Reformation that pushed the idea of reading scripture for yourself. Don't go through a priest, don't let them tell you what to think, pick it up and read it yourself. So that is a very important thing for Protestants, but something that I came to late in life is I grew up in church, I grew up learning Bible stories, but I didn't grow up necessarily reading it for myself until I was a teenager. I realized when I went through great changes in my life and felt called by God that I never actually read the whole Bible. And so I tried many, many times and I think it's a common New Year's resolution. This is the year I'm going to read the Bible. And Genesis is how it just starts so beautifully, it doesn't end in the beginning of God created the heavens of the earth and you're drawn in with these familiar stories. There's no one and there's Moses and then there's Leviticus. I never got past Leviticus, I don't know about you. And so I was never a very faithful Bible reader other than reading pieces of it. One of the things that really changed my life was when I heard the phrase, "The Bible is a library." And so I was always trying to read it from one end to the other, but I was encouraged to treat it as a library where you check out a book. And the books, especially the letters of the New Testament, are so much more accessible. But I still wanted to read through the Bible, read the whole Bible, and if you've ever done it, you know or if you've ever tried, you know that that draw to say, "This book is crucial to my faith," and I've never actually read it, from cover to cover. Some people are good at that stuff, some of us aren't. I think what helped me, not I think, what helped me to finally do that was to take a class, to have the accountability of a group of people. And I took a class called "Disciples Bible Study" that had a guide book and we met once a week. We had a theme word every week in a section of the Bible to read. We didn't actually read all the Bible because there were sections of the law, or Psalms or Proverbs, where we read some of it that gave us a flavor for all of it, so the parts that were maybe a little more difficult to sit and read through, we didn't actually read. But we went from Genesis to Revelation and it was a great accomplishment, even if I didn't do all my reading every week. I found that there are a lot of rabbit trails that you can go down, places where you get bogged down and don't understand, and so you want to find out or you just get stuck. And having that group helped me to keep moving, that we were always moving forward every week, even when I got stuck. So I made that statement that the things that change you or the people you're with and the things you read. So I've since either taken that class or taught that class many times, and it's so different, depending on the conversation partners in the room, who's leading, who's asking questions. And so we do read the Bible in community as a church and in groups, it is given to us to live together in Christian community and we are very affected by the perspective of the people around us and how they read the Bible. Another thing that was really life-changing for me in helping me read the Bible was learning about Lectio Divina, and that is a way of reading where you're not just reading for comprehension, but you're reading in a divine way. You're reading for meditation. So you read slower, you repeat, and you hold on to words and phrases and ponder them and let them speak to you. In 2021, I was pastoring in Kyle, I very much wanted church to come back and we were still kind of shut down from COVID, and I really wanted to teach the disciple class, and so I developed a way to do it online. I gave a reading assignment every week and I made a little video every week, and I thought it might be cool to turn it into a book, but I never did. So I'm going to work toward that a little bit more this year, and if you go to my website, www.pastrstella.net, you can download a reading plan, have adapted it for the dates in 2025, and also all the videos I made that year, but you don't really need to do that, because I want to invite you to read this year with me and maybe read a little different. As I said, every time I've read through the Bible, it's been different for me, because I'm a different person, I'm in a different place in my life, and maybe you found that with Scripture, that you come back to a Scripture that you've already read, and you notice something different, you hear something different, or maybe you're with someone who notices something different and it catches your attention, or maybe you hear a sermon where a Scripture is interpreted a different way, or maybe you've never even read it at all, and it's just all new. I didn't know this was in the Bible. I'll give you a really good example that I learned about from a professor at Austin Seminary in one of her writings. She gave the example of the story of the prodigal son, which is very familiar. The son leaves home, he asks for his inheritance, and he leaves home, and he finds that he's wasted everything, and he wants to come back home. When we Americans are asked to tell the story, to retell the story of the prodigal son, we might tell it, sort of like I just did, but the thing that was pointed out was in some places, an example I think was Russia, when people there were asked to retell the story, they told the story, and they said, "You know, the son left home, and then there was a great famine," and he found himself starving, and he came home, "that the Russians always mentioned the famine, and the Americans never did, because they have lived through times of hunger like that, and the famine was an important part of the story." And we, who have never known real hunger, don't even notice that part. And so we bring ourselves to Scripture, and we bring our lenses to Scripture, and when we come back to Scripture, we find layers in it. We add layers to it as our understanding deepens. And so my plan for this year is not just to read, but to do some art, where for every part that I read each week, I'm going to add another layer, and build up a piece of art with layers. I have this picture on Pinterest that I saved a long time ago, and I wanted to try to copy this style of art. So I'm going to be doing that this year, and I hope that you'll watch, and listen. So I want to talk about a couple of advantages of reading Scripture as a way to invite you in to read at whatever level you want, or you can, or whatever reading plan you want to make for yourself, whether you get inspired to take a class, or do a Bible study at your church, or with friends, or to follow along, or use some of these resources that I'm sharing with you, because it will deepen you and change you. You read Scripture this year. Another advantage that I want to talk about, though, is that reading Scripture gives us vocabulary. It gives us a bank to go to when we feel something, we have words for it, we experience something. We say, "Oh, I know a biblical character. I know a story where a person had to have courage, or had to leave home, or whatever it is, do without, or be rejected. When we go through things in life, we can go to Scripture and find others who have lived that story." So it gives us a vocabulary. I am part of a listening prayer group that I do on Zoom sometimes. It's a group that is through Bethany, United Methodist Church, where I was, but it's a group that has different people from different places and I enjoy praying with them when I can, and we get together, we pray, we pray a prayer of confession, and then we turn off our computers and just sit in prayer each on our own for about 20 minutes and then we come back. We go to God with a question or just to listen, and what I love about this group is the people in it know Scripture so well that as they're praying, sometimes they might just let their Bible fall open and see where God leads them, but a lot of times they know Scripture backwards and forwards and they're drawn to things or they read something that leads them to something else. And I find that people who are really deep in their faith have this kind of knowledge of Scripture that they can go deep with it, they know where to find things, they know where to turn a page and go, "Ah, God, you and I have had this conversation before and I remember what you told me," and so reading the Bible again, even if you've read it before, I think you know it, is a good thing. And reading it, going into it, assuming that God will speak to you. So the first word before we begin from my list of the Bible of 40 words is the word behold, when I tell you a little bit about that word, the word behold can be found in Scripture about 1500 times. And the reason I say about is because it really depends on the Bible translation. There are a lot of beholds in the King James version, but in more modern versions it might say, "Look or see or listen," and so other times that word that is in the original text in the Greek or Hebrew is just taken out because it's just sort of an exclamation mark. So in Hebrew, it's Hene and in Greek, it's I-dow, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing either of those right, but that word that's calling our attention is so thick in Scripture, it's all over Scripture, over and over again God says, "Look, behold." And so our call before we start any study of Scripture is to realize that the God speaks first, that God calls to us and tells us to look, tells us to listen, wants our attention, wants relationship with us. Revelation 320. Jesus says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock." What do you answer? In Isaiah, "Behold, see, I am doing a new thing." Don't you see it? It's springing up that the context of Isaiah, people who were scattered, that God is calling back to return home to Israel, to build the temple, to come together again that God is doing a new thing. And so will you answer the door? Will you pay attention to the path forward that God has for you? Will you behold and see what God wants to make of you this year? So I want to encourage you to make a plan, and I want to talk about that. So what will your plan be for beholding? One of the videos that I made that you can find on my website in the Bible in 40 Words is how to choose a Bible. You might have a Bible already, but the Bible you use makes a difference in that. There can be a lot of footnotes, it can be a study Bible, it can be a very traditional kind of translation, more modern translation, and you might want to use a different Bible that you've used before. You might want to listen to Bible Gateway has a couple of different versions of recorded, and you might want to make that part of your listening when you read the Bible. Or will you just do kind of a verse? Will you just maybe get my list and just pay attention to one word to meditate on? I'm seeing a lot of people choosing a word for the year. What word is going to guide you this year? Is it going to be the word joy or hope? A friend of mine had a year where she said, "My word this year is adventure." I'm going to go on adventures and have adventures. Maybe you just want to take favorite passages or words to meditate on, but how will you let scripture speak to your life? So I'm going to work on bringing this into the podcast this year. Since it's a new year, I'm starting a new season, so season two of the podcast, starting today. As I read through the Bible, I'm going to bring a little perspective on the podcast. From my perspective is someone living on the edge of art and creating some art as I go, so maybe this podcast can be part of your plan for engaging with scripture this year. But I want to encourage you to come along with me and whatever that looks like for you to commit that this would be the year that you engage with scripture, to cover to cover or just do a little lecture or divina and focus on words that move you or that speak to you or maybe even just one word of scripture that you hold on to all your lawn and let that be your north star. All right, so you heard a challenge here. How will you behold God in 2025? How will you encounter scripture? I've tried to offer a whole bunch of ways to do that because I really want you to come along with me. Seriously, one of the things that I'm dealing with in this living on the edge period of my life is a whole lot of loneliness. I need you guys. I need connection. It's been hard being in such great churches in the past and now I'm kind of free-floating, so I hope that in some way you'll engage. So again, some choices for you. You can go to my website www.pastrestella.net and check out my reading guide where you use your own, read through the Bible this year with me. You can listen to this podcast and just hear some impressions that I have and encounter the Bible that way. One word at a time, I've got my blank canvas. I'm going to start an art piece and add to it every week. If you have just been thinking about this New Year's resolution of reading the Bible or engaging with scripture or doing a Bible study or saying yes to that thing that's been put out to you at your church, I encourage you to do that and let's dig into the word together. So I am going to be reading ahead of you. I'm going to start Genesis 1 through 20 and our next word, the word wonder. So I'm going to invite you into that. Next week. So this week, take a breath, pick a Bible, think about the way you are going to be hold and we'll start Genesis 1 next week, see you then. [BLANK_AUDIO]
The most important things this year, the things that will determine who you become, are the people you surround yourself with and the things you read. This podcast is about making the commitment to read through the Bible and some ways to follow through on that resolution. This is the first podcast of the new series about living on the edge of art - living a life of faith when you find yourself in not-quite-there-yet places. Was this helpful? You can contact me at www.pastorstella.net.
