HOW TO READ · 2026-10-26
The day's guides
Practice
Read the Prayer Someone Else Prayed in Trouble
When you have no words of your own, the Bible has already supplied a few hundred, written by people who were in worse shape than you.
There are days when you open the Bible and nothing in you wants to read. You are tired, or worried, or simply flat. On those days the usual advice, to study a passage carefully and take notes, feels like being handed a spreadsheet at a funeral. A better use of the book is to borrow its prayers.
The Psalms are the obvious place, and in particular the ones scholars call laments. Psalm 13 is four questions that begin with 'How long?' and then settles, in its last two verses, into trust. Psalm 130 begins 'Out of the depths.' Psalm 88 is the strangest: it ends in darkness and never turns. Its presence in the canon is a quiet permission. You are allowed to pray without arriving anywhere.
Start by reading the psalm as what it was: one person speaking to God in a particular trouble. Notice who they blame, what they ask for, and what they remember. Many laments do the same three things. They complain, they request, and they recall something God has done. Seeing that pattern helps, because it shows that honest prayer has a shape, and the shape is not politeness.
Then read it a second time as yours. Do not paraphrase it into your own circumstances or soften the harsh lines. If the psalm says 'my soul is full of troubles', let that sentence do the work of saying what you could not. The words are borrowed, but the act of saying them is your own. People have prayed this way for three thousand years, and it works precisely because it asks nothing of your inventiveness.
Finally, resist the urge to fix the psalm. If it ends in confidence, you need not feel confident; read the confidence as something said by a person further along the road. If it ends in dark, as Psalm 88 does, let it end there. Close the book. The prayer has been prayed.
Keep a short list on the inside cover of the laments that have served you: number and a few words. Over a year the list becomes something like a first-aid kit, and you will know where it is when you need it.
- Pick one psalm of distress, such as Psalm 13, 42, 88 or 130.
- Read it once as the prayer of the person who wrote it.
- Read it again, changing nothing, as your own.
- Stop where the psalm stops; do not add a happy ending.
8 MIN
Tools
A Word-for-Word Translation Is a Magnifying Glass
The most literal translations read awkwardly on purpose, and that awkwardness is information.
Translators face a choice that can't be avoided. They can stay close to the shape of the original, word for word and image for image, or they can recast it in the natural idiom of the reader's language. Both approaches are honest. They simply serve different purposes, and a literal translation is best understood as a magnifying glass rather than a window.
Take a familiar verse. In many literal versions, Jesus says 'blessed are the poor in spirit' and Paul speaks of 'the obedience of faith'. These phrases sound slightly off in English, and that is the point. The translator has declined to smooth over something that is dense or ambiguous in Greek, and has left it for you to turn over.
So treat the oddness as a flag. When a sentence reads clumsily, ask whether the clumsiness comes from the original or from the translators. A footnote often tells you. Sometimes the answer is that Hebrew simply repeats itself, as in 'surely dying you shall die', where a freer version says 'you will certainly die'. The literal rendering lets you hear the emphasis built into the grammar.
Do not stay in the literal version for everything. It can make narrative sound like a legal document and bury a joke or a proverb's punch. Use it where the argument is tight: the letters of Paul, the laws, the dense lines of the prophets. For stories and psalms, a more readable translation may bring you closer to what the first hearers experienced.
A practical habit is to keep both open. Read the plain version first for sense, then the literal one for texture, and put a small pencil mark beside any phrase that changed your understanding. After a few months you will have a feel for where the hard places are, and you will rely less on anyone's summary of what the text 'really means'.
- Choose a passage you already know well.
- Read it in a literal translation such as the ESV, NASB or KJV.
- Mark every place where the English feels stiff or odd.
- Ask what the stiffness might be preserving.
10 MIN
Getting started
Begin With the Last Chapter of a Book You Like Least
A reluctant reader is often better served by a small, bounded exit than a heroic entrance.
Most reading plans begin at the beginning, which is fine for novels and hard on ancient books. The openings of Numbers, Jeremiah or Hebrews can feel like a locked door. Yet the endings of those books are often far more welcoming, because writers tend to gather their purposes at the close.
Choose a book you have been dodging. Turn to the last chapter and read it, once, at a normal pace, then again more slowly. You are not trying to understand everything. You are trying to see where the author thought the whole thing was going.
The ending of Jeremiah, for example, is a record of the fall of Jerusalem and then a small act of mercy toward an exiled king. That tells you what sort of book it is: grief with a thread of hope tied to it. The last chapter of Hebrews turns suddenly practical, with instructions about hospitality, prisoners and marriage, and so shows that all the earlier argument was meant for ordinary life.
After reading, write one sentence in the margin or a notebook: 'This book seems to be about...' Be willing to be wrong. The sentence is a hypothesis, and the opening chapters will test it. That gives your reading a question to carry, which is the thing a reluctant reader usually lacks.
Then decide. If the ending made you curious, go back and read chapter one with the destination in view. You will notice details you would have missed. If it did not, you have lost seven minutes and gained a rough picture of a book you can come back to later. Either way, the book is no longer a stranger.
- Choose a book you tend to avoid.
- Read only its final chapter, slowly.
- Write one sentence on what the book seems to have been aiming at.
- Decide whether to read the first chapter next.
7 MIN
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