a late night thought

Lately as I do my slow reads of small passages of the Bible, the Lord is pressing the weight of each word on me as I read and reread. It's like each word is a little pebble dropped into water, drifting slowly down to settle on the underwater land - slowly they drift down, and slowly they sink in a bit more, and wow! they pop off the page.

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep I thought of what good practice this is for slowly looking at and weighing the lives of each and every person that I come in contact with. I think the tendency for reading Scripture and being with people is to rush, rush, rush through what we think we know to get to something that strikes us as foreign, and then we sit and mull. I think our tendency is to try to sort people and scripture into "known" and "unknown" categories, so that we can skim past the "known" and fixate on the "unknown." With people, we want to brush off the uninteresting and with Scripture, we want to rush through the familiar.

Anyhow, basically I think that a slow reading of each of the words in the Word is good practice for looking at people with thoughtfulness and slowness to judge.