5 Reasons I Finally Knew Where To Turn, In The Ten Months I Watched My Father Die
I had a Bible on that nightstand the entire time. I did not know what to do with it. Nobody had ever taught me where to look, and I was not about to learn in the middle of it. Then I changed which Bible I was reading, and everything about those mornings changed with it. ★★★★★
The Week You Need It Most Is The Week You Have No Idea Where To Look.
They turned my father's defibrillator off on a Thursday in February.
The nurse told us three days. I sat in the parking lot afterward and did the math on how I was going to get through a weekend.
He lived until the sixteenth of December.
Ten months. Every one of them at our house, in the back bedroom, with me.
And hospice discharged him partway through it. Not because anything got better. Because he had not, in their words, passed away in a timely manner.
You do not have a response ready for a sentence like that. I still do not.
Now here is the part I actually want to tell you, because it is the part nobody says out loud.
There was a Bible on that nightstand the whole ten months. My mother's. Good leather, gold on the edges of the pages.
I did not know what to do with it.
I would sit down at five in the morning with coffee, open it somewhere in the middle, read half a chapter about somebody's descendants, and close it. That was it. That was my quiet time for most of a year.
People from church kept telling me God had a plan. I know He does. That did not tell me what to read at five in the morning with him moaning in the next room.
I did not need a plan explained to me. I needed a page number.
That is the whole reason I am writing this.
The Bible I read now has a section in the back called Answers To Life's Questions. You do not look up a word. You look up the thing that is actually happening to you, and it takes you to the passages.
There is another one called What The Bible Says About, which gathers everything Scripture says on one subject in one place.
If I had owned this in February I would have had somewhere to go on the first morning instead of the two hundredth.
That is not a small thing. When you are in it, you do not have the strength to go looking. You have about four minutes and whatever is already open.
"When my husband got sick I did not even know what to read. I looked up what I was going through and it took me right to the verses I needed. That section alone was worth it."
I Used To Read A Verse, Not Understand It, And Feel Stupid. Now There Is An Arrow.
I want to be honest about something that took me years to admit.
I did not understand most of my Bible.
I would read a line, not get it, and keep going. Then read another one, not get that either, and keep going. Do that for twenty minutes and you have not read anything. You have just moved your eyes.
And you cannot say that in a Sunday school class. You sit there and nod.
So here is what is different about this one, and it is almost embarrassingly simple.
There are two little marks in the margin.
A star means the verse you just read is a promise from God. In my mother's Bible a promise looked exactly the same as a list of who begat who. Same type, same size. Nothing tells you which is which. One small mark and the page sorts itself out.
An arrow means look down. At the bottom of that same page there is a block that says LIFE LESSONS, and Dr. Charles Stanley takes the verse apart in plain words.
Not a commentary I have to go buy. Not endnotes in the back I will never turn to. The page I am already on.
Here is one I underlined twice.
"Through God we shall do valiantly." And at the foot of the page: "While on our own we can do nothing, through faith in God we can do valiantly."
On our own we can do nothing.
You read that at a normal point in your life and it is a nice sentiment. You read it at five in the morning in month seven of caring for a dying man, and it is the only true sentence in the house.
I would never have found that on my own. I would have read right past it and felt stupid, the way I always did.
You are not just reading the Bible in this one. Somebody is sitting there teaching you while you read it.
"I read a verse, then read what it actually means right there on the same page, and for the first time it stopped going in one ear and right out the other."
You Have Been Sitting In This Exact Format Every Sunday Of Your Life. Nobody Ever Put It In The Book.
Think about what actually happens in a sermon.
A man reads a passage out loud. Then he spends twenty minutes telling you what it means and where it lands on an ordinary Tuesday.
Passage, then explanation. That is it. That is the oldest teaching structure the church has, and it is why you can walk out on a Sunday understanding something you could not have gotten to on your own all week.
Then you go home and open a Bible that gives you the first half and nothing else.
That is all this book is. The passage, and then a man explaining it, on the same page. Over and over, for a year.
And the man doing the explaining is Dr. Charles F. Stanley, who pastored First Baptist Atlanta for close to fifty years and was on In Touch for four decades. My mother watched him on Sunday mornings. Half the women in my church could tell you his voice.
I was never missing the ability. I was missing the second half of the Sunday.
The Verse That Held Me Up Is Not One Anybody Ever Read To Me.
Somewhere in the middle of those ten months, on a completely ordinary morning, I was not looking for anything.
I was just reading the day.
And this came up.
"My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
My flesh and my heart may fail.
That is a verse about a body giving out. It was sitting there in the middle of a Tuesday, in a book I had been handed by the calendar, on a morning I had not asked it for anything.
I read it four times and then I sat there.
Now here is what I want you to understand, because this is the part that changed how I think about the whole book.
I would never have found that verse. Not in a hundred years.
Everybody knows Psalm 23. That is the one they read when it is over. I have heard it at every funeral I have ever been to.
I needed something for the part before it is over. And nobody had ever handed me that.
So ask yourself a question I had never once asked. Every verse you know, who picked it?
A pastor picked most of them, over twenty years of Sunday mornings. A Sunday school teacher picked a few. Somebody wrote one inside a graduation card. Every single one of them was choosing.
Which means what you know has the shape of other people's favorites. It does not have the shape of the book.
And the verse you are going to need most is almost never one of the famous ones.
Dr. Stanley explains what you read. He does not choose what you read. The date does that, and the date has no favorites and no idea what you are going through.
This one is laid out by the day, straight through the year. So across twelve months your eyes reach every page. Including the pages nobody would ever have picked for you.
People at church told me that verse finding me was a God thing. I believe that. I also know exactly how it got in front of me.
It was the layout.
"I have been in church my whole life and I am still finding passages I had never once read. It is humbling and honestly it has become the best part of my morning."
What The Page Does When You Have Nothing Left
All four are the same Word of God. What changes is whether you are alone with it at five in the morning.
Only one of them was built for a woman reading alone at a kitchen table with nobody left to ask.
Some Days I Had Four Minutes. There Was Nothing To Fall Behind On.
Nobody who tells you to spend an hour with the Lord every morning has ever cared for a dying parent.
I was up at two. I was up at four. I was on the phone with an insurance office that had my father listed as deceased in one system and active in another. There was no hour. Some days there were four minutes.
Any Bible that needed more than that was going to end up closed, and then I was going to feel guilty about it, and then I was going to stop opening it at all.
This one gives you four short readings instead of one long one.
- Old Testament. The longest part of the day
- A Psalm
- A Proverb
- New Testament
Fifteen minutes on a good day. I have done it in eight. And because there are four different places, you never get stuck in a dry stretch on its own.
You also never sit there deciding where to start. The date already decided. Today is right there waiting for you.
But here is the thing that actually mattered to me, and I want to say it plainly.
There is no schedule to fall behind on.
Every reading plan I ever tried tracked my progress, which meant it also tracked my debt. Miss four days sitting up in a hospital chair and it tells you that you are four days behind. And now the Bible is one more thing you have let down, on a list that is already too long.
Nothing happens here. You turn to today. Today is a full day's reading no matter how long it has been.
I put it down for most of October. I picked it up on a Tuesday in November and I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
"Got sick and missed over two weeks of mornings. With my old reading plan that would have been the end of it. Opened this to the date and it was just a normal day's reading."
I Thought I Was Bad At The Bible. I Was Not. I Just Never Had One Built To Help Me.
For most of my adult life I believed that the people at church who understood their Bible had been given something I had not.
A better mind for it. A stronger faith. Some closeness to God that made it come easy to them and hard to me.
I believed that for thirty years and it kept me out of my own Bible.
It is not true. It was never true.
They had help.
A father who explained it at the supper table. A pastor who taught verse by verse for a decade. Four years of seminary. A grandmother on a Sunday afternoon with nowhere to be.
Nobody understands a hard book on their own. Not one person. The only difference between the woman Scripture opens up for and the woman it does not is who had somebody explaining it to her.
I did not have that. My mother was a good woman who read her Bible every day and could not have told you what most of it meant either. She just never said so.
That is what this book gave me. Fifty years of Dr. Stanley's teaching, sitting right there on the page, in his own words, at five in the morning when there was nobody else awake.
I had the heart for this my whole life. What I never had was a Bible built to help me.
"I grew up in church and still felt like I was on the outside of my own Bible. This is the first time it felt like someone sat down and explained it in a way I could carry with me."
You Do Not Need A Year. You Need One Morning Where You Knew Where To Open It.
I am not going to tell you a book fixed any of this.
My father still died. He died on the sixteenth of December at twenty past four in the afternoon and there is no Bible on this earth that was going to change that.
There were weeks I did not pray at all. I am not proud of it and I am not going to pretend otherwise on a page that is trying to sell you a Bible.
So here is what I will actually claim, and it is smaller than what most people would promise you.
It gave me words. On the mornings I had none of my own, I opened it and something was already there, and about four times out of ten it was the thing I needed. That is not nothing. When you are in it, that is close to everything.
And you do not need twelve months to find out. You need one morning where you sat down carrying something and the page met you.
That happened for me inside the first two weeks. Not a lightning bolt. Just a verse that made sense because somebody had written the explanation underneath it.
So it comes with thirty days. Read it, and if Scripture has not started opening up for you, send it back and get every cent. No forms and no questions.
You will not be the first. It is read by more than 400,000 people and rated 4.9 out of 5 across 10,368 reviews, and the same three sentences come up over and over.
- "I finally knew where to turn"
- "It finally makes sense to me"
- "I read the whole Bible for the first time"
And here is what the year actually looks like, since nobody tells you.
- Week oneFour short readings and it is easier than you expect. That is the thing almost everybody says first.
- Month oneYou start running into verses you did not know were in there.
- Month sixIt stops being a thing you do and turns into part of the morning. Nobody can name the day that happened.
- Twelve monthsYou will have read all sixty six books. Most people never do, and I never had.
There Is Somebody You Have Been Worried About And You Have Not Known What To Say
You can picture her already. A sister. A friend from church who has stopped answering. Somebody whose year is going the way mine went.
You have wanted to say something and every single thing you thought of sounded like a card.
That is not a failure of love. Nobody ever walked you to the verse either.
People brought me casseroles for ten months. I was grateful and I threw most of them out. The one thing I would have wanted was somewhere to open the book.
A lot of people order two. One to keep and one for the person they cannot stop thinking about.
December Sixteenth Has My Handwriting On It.
I still read it. Not because of some promise I made at a graveside, but because I am halfway through a year now and I have never been this far into the Bible in my life.
And I go back to those dates. February, when they told us three days. The Tuesday with Psalm 73 on it. The sixteenth of December.
There is writing in the margins on all of them. That is not something my mother's Bible could have given me, and it is not something a devotional could have given me either.
You do not know which morning you are going to need this yet. That is exactly why you get it before you do.
The Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Daily Bible
The verse, then Dr. Charles Stanley explaining it, printed on the same page. One dated reading a morning, about fifteen minutes, until you have read the whole book.
Charles F. Stanley · New American Standard · 365 Dated Readings
- Answers To Life's Questions, so you look up what is happening to you rather than a word
- What The Bible Says About, gathering everything Scripture says on one subject
- An arrow points to the Life Lesson on that same page, where Dr. Stanley explains the verse
- A star marks every promise from God, so you know one when you see it
- Life Principles, full teaching pages, lined up with what you have just read
- Life Examples, showing a real person in Scripture and what happened to them
- Every day's reading already chosen, so you never sit there deciding
- Old Testament, a Psalm, a Proverb and New Testament daily, so no morning is all dry
- The complete New American Standard text, about an inch thick
- 365 dated readings, so twelve months from now you will have read all sixty six books
- Free express shipping and The Daily Prayer Blueprint ebook on 2 or 3 copies
- No schedule to fall behind on, and 30 days to send it back
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I wrote all of this down because for ten months I could not find anybody who had said it plainly, and I needed somebody to.
If you are in the middle of your own version of it right now, I am sorry. Get the book or do not get the book. But do not spend a year believing the problem is you. It was never me either.