Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee, Cabel, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. Today, I want to tell you how I got to this place hosting this podcast and loving reading the Bible because that wasn't always my story. I figured if you and I are going to spend every morning having a conversation, it might be nice to hear a little bit about each other. I grew up in a Christian home, and my first memory is my mom teaching me John 3:16, around the time I was three years old. Not long after that, my brother, Jason, asked me if I wanted to be a Christian, and he prayed with me to follow Christ with my life. I was probably only about four years old, so I had very little idea of what that amounted to. But I think most of us rarely understand what's happening when we first respond to Jesus. But I was in an environment that gave me every opportunity to learn. Church three times a week, Christian school, and even my summers and weekends were spent working in the Christian bookstore my family owns. I started writing Bible studies in high school and college, and I had a real love for the things I did know about the Bible, but I'd never really read through the Bible.

During college, I started on a path toward full-time ministry, and I made lots of friends traveling the world as a musician and a writer and a speaker. One of those friends was a pastor named Lee, who lives in South Carolina. I lived in New York City at the time, but I toured in the south regularly. I remember one day at his church when he casually asked me if I'd ever read through the whole Bible. I replied with something like, I think I have. I've probably pieced it together over the years and covered the whole thing that way. His response to me changed the trajectory of my life in the best way possible. He said, Read it. Read the whole thing. Let your eyes fall on every word. Don't skip anything. Not even the genealogies or the laws. He was so passionate about it. I was pretty stunned. He really seems to love the Bible, not just believe it. Then he said, And I would encourage you to say very little on stage until you've read it all. Wow, that was the wake up call I needed. How had I been doing ministry without reading scripture first.

If I hadn't read the Bible, I might be taking something out of context when I quote it, or I might be saying something that actually contradicts the overarching story of scripture. Yikes. These words put a holy fear in me. I started the next day. I set out to read it for the first time all the way through. I'll be honest, it was hard, but almost anything worth doing has some level of difficulty that you can't undercut. As I pressed on, the challenge was actually less about reading it or understanding it and more about accepting what I was reading and understanding. I didn't expect that part. I was seeing things about God that I'd never seen before. He was doing things that confused me. I'm not just talking about Old Testament God, I'm talking about New Testament Jesus. In fact, most of my struggles happened when I got to the New Testament. That part was much more challenging for me. During that first year, I really had a hard time. I didn't like what I was seeing. There were a few passages that were especially challenging to me, and I took them to a mentor of mine as well as to Lee.

And talking to them about it really helped me. That's one of the things I hope to offer as a part of the Bible recap to be the guide to you that they were to me during my first few years of Bible reading. One of my mentors I took the questions to said, Hey, this thing that bothers you, keep looking for that. You might see it somewhere other than just in these one or two chapters. The next year I decided, Okay, I'm going to read it again and I'm going to look for who God is because that was the primary thing that was bothering me. I asked God to give me a lens for that. I said, God, this is the book you've given us to reveal yourself to us, so help me see who you are in what I read today. On that second trip through His Word, when I was looking for Him, I found Him and I fell in love with Him. I began to see not just what He was doing, but why he was doing it, what his heart was behind it. He answered that prayer to teach me about Himself in a way that I felt like I was learning a whole different God than I'd heard about in Church.

I realized that I'd only been seeing fractions of him, not the whole thing. He was so much more beautiful when I saw the whole picture. That's one of the reasons why I love this chronological Bible reading plan we're doing together. That's one of the reasons I want to encourage you to press through when it gets hard because as someone who has felt alienated by it and stuck in it, as someone who has felt frustrated and confused and who really wanted to disengage because I was starting to not like God, hang in there because the good stuff is on the other side of that struggle, I promise. If you've been trying to piece this thing together, if you've wanted this or even just wanted to want it, if you feel the desire on some level but don't know if you have the tools, I'm here to help you with that. To walk through this with you, to hand you those tools along the way, to help you overcome this so that you can begin to recognize yourself as a child of God who knows Him and who is in an active, intimate relationship with Him. The first step is to do what I did and ask Him for help.

Or maybe you're here because you don't have a relationship with God and you're trying to figure out who He is. If that's you, you can ask Him for help too, even if you don't believe in him yet. It's okay to ask with uncertainty. It's okay for it to feel a little weird and awkward. No one will even know the prayer you pray in your head, asking him to help you know if he's real. In our next episode, prep episode three, I'm going to interview that pastor who challenged me to read through the Bible for the first time. I'm excited to hear his side of that story because honestly, I don't know what prompted him to ask me that question that day. He may not even remember the conversation or be aware of how much it changed my life, but stick around find out. That episode is called Why Reading the Whole Bible is Important, and it features my good friend Lee McDermott, who pastors New Spring Church in Greenville, South Carolina. If you haven't subscribed to the Bible recap yet, do that now. It's just one click away. Get ready to read through God's word with me because I promise you, He is where the joy is.

The Bible recap is brought to you by D Group, discipleship and Bible study groups that meet in homes and churches around the world each week. For more information on D Group, visit mydgroup. Org.