I used to read the way I used to live — fast, careless, and without retaining anything. I'd blow through three chapters of the Bible and not be able to tell you a single thing I'd read. It was like eating without tasting. Just getting through it so I could check the box and feel like a good Christian.
A mentor of mine in recovery — older guy, been sober twenty-something years, never in a rush about anything — watched me speed-reading one morning and said, "You're doing the Bible the same way you did drugs. Fast and desperate."
That one landed.
He was right. I'd brought my addiction brain into my faith. More is better. Faster is better. Cover ground. Don't sit still. Because sitting still means thinking, and thinking means feeling, and feeling is the thing I'd spent a decade running from.
Why Speed Was My Default
Addiction trains you to move fast. The highs are fast. The crashes are fast. You make impulsive decisions and deal with the consequences later (or more often, you don't deal with them at all). Your whole nervous system gets wired for urgency. Everything is now, now, now.
When I got clean, that wiring didn't magically reset. I brought it into everything. I tried to read the entire Bible in thirty days. I signed up for three Bible studies simultaneously. I was treating spiritual growth like a sprint, as if I could earn God's approval through volume.
But that's not how Scripture works. The Bible isn't a textbook you cram for. It's more like a meal you're supposed to sit with. And I was wolfing it down standing over the kitchen sink.
The Thing That Changed Everything
My mentor introduced me to something called lectio divina. Latin for "divine reading." I'd never heard of it. It sounded kind of Catholic and mysterious, and I was skeptical. But I was also desperate, so I tried it.
The basic idea is simple: take a small passage — maybe five or six verses — and read it slowly. Then read it again. And again. Don't analyze it. Don't cross-reference. Just let a word or phrase rise to the surface, like something floating up from deep water.
So I tried it with Psalm 34:18: "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit."
Read it once. Fine. Read it twice. OK. Read it a third time, and the word "close" just... stuck. Like it had hooks in it. Close. The Lord is close. Not distant. Not watching from a safe distance. Close. Right here. In the brokenness, not despite it.
I sat with that word for maybe twenty minutes. My coffee got cold. I didn't care. Something was happening that I can't fully explain — it was like the verse bypassed my brain and went straight to my chest. I wasn't analyzing it anymore. I was feeling it.
That had never happened to me in all my speed-reading.
Less Is Genuinely More
I know people who've read the Bible cover to cover a dozen times and live like it never touched them. I also know a woman at my church — Gloria, mid-sixties, barely finished high school — who knows maybe forty verses by heart and carries a peace that makes no earthly sense. The difference isn't knowledge. It's depth.
You don't need to read five chapters a day. You need to let one verse get under your skin. One truth, fully absorbed, will sustain you through more than ten chapters you skimmed during your commute. I'm not knocking reading plans — they have their place. But if you're flying through the Bible and nothing is changing, maybe the problem isn't what you're reading. Maybe it's how fast you're going.
In recovery we say "progress, not perfection." The same applies here. You're not behind. If you read three verses today and one of them made you stop and think, that's a good day. You read enough.
A Different Speed
If you're someone who moves fast — and let's be honest, that's most of us whether we're in recovery or not — I want to invite you to try something. Tomorrow morning, pick one passage. Six verses, max. Read it out loud, slowly, like you're reading a letter from someone you love. Then read it again. Notice what catches your attention. Don't force anything. Just notice.
Talk to God about it. Not a formal prayer. Just, "Hey, that word 'close' — what are you saying to me with that?" And then sit there for a minute. Let it be quiet.
You might feel nothing. That's fine. Come back the next day. The roots grow underground before anything shows up on the surface. I promise they're growing.