Open Your Bible

BY Raechel Myers

“I just can’t open my Bible.”

They were only asking for prayer requests, but I was surrounded by people who loved me and it felt safe enough to be honest. It had been four months since we buried our stillborn daughter and just as many since my aching arms had reached for my Bible. My very wounded heart—which lived and breathed and clung to the book like never before throughout the uncertainty of my pregnancy—felt betrayed, weak, and hopeless.

There I sat in Tara’s living room with a dozen other women, circled up for the first Bible study I’d attended since our Evie Grace was born. I really only came because I needed to get out of the house. Instead of showing judgment, my friend Allison opened the worn pages of the Bible in her lap and simply said, “That’s okay. Let me read it to you instead.”

Lifting her bookmark from its place, she began to read Psalm 62. As she read on through the end of the chapter, these friends of mine gathered closer. Like I was starving, too weak to lift food to my own mouth, they spoon-fed Scripture while I sat and wept and listened to the Word that never stopped being alive or true, even when it remained unread.

What has kept you from opening your Bible?

Maybe your heart has also been wounded, and the very words that have the power to comfort and restore remind you instead of what you have lost. Maybe you’re afraid of what you’ll find. You may believe it’s true and good for others, but it doesn’t seem necessary for you. Or maybe you feel downright disqualified or unequipped. You’ve tried to open it and read it on your own, but quickly found it was more complicated than you expected.

But here’s the thing.

The Bible is for you, and it is for right now. It’s for you if you’ve never read it, and it’s for you if you have two doctorates in theology (anyone?). It’s for the moment you are so overcome with grief that your body forgets to breathe in and out on its own, and it’s for the time when you really don’t have time to open its pages for yourself. You, right where you are, do not have to wait for someone to take you by the hand to open the pages of Scripture. You can open your Bible just as you are.

Move forward knowing you are not disqualified. No amount of knowledge or accomplishments makes you more or less able to meet God in His Word. Nothing you are doing, have done, or will do renders you ineligible for the good news of the gospel. This holy book exists for moments just like this—the moment you lay it open and look for Him.