On Reading the Bible One Verse at a Time
I finished my Ph.D. and wrote my entire dissertation at a distance, not only from Vanderbilt but also, sitting in my basement in Watertown, SD, a distance from any significant academic library. This distance required me to acquire a sizeable library related to eighteenth-century British history, Romanticism, and evangelicalism to actually get any work done, but it also got me into the unfortunate habit of reflexively buying every book I wanted to read. Now, seeking to reign in my excessive (and all too often morally self-justified) book spending, I’ve gone over to what I assume most normal humans who read lots of books do—I’m checking out lots of books, especially audiobooks, from the local library. The behavior shift means that I’m coming books aimed at a more general readership that I likely wouldn’t have read. My changing habits led me to a book about changing habits, Atomic Habits by James Clear, a book I waited about a month on the holds list for.
I’m glad I waited. There’s a reason the book is so popular. It’s accessible, reads quickly, and has action items at the end of each chapter for you to start implementing the suggestions. The book’s core premise, from which it gets its title, is that small, on-their-own-imperceptible behavior changes combine together to make big differences. A 1% improvement every day leads to almost 38 times better performance over the course of a year while a getting 1% worse each day leads to a decline to almost 0% performance. Dramatic systemic change can come about from this insight: Apply this to complex behavior systems, break the systems into as many individual component behaviors as possible, look for 1% increases in that component behavior, and eventually you’re going to start seeing extraordinary improvements. Habits, essentially functioning to automatize these individual small changes that can compound over time and within systems, offer one of the best ways to start making big desired changes a reality. The “atomic” from Atomic Habits thus comes from the way in which habits function like atoms: extremely small and inconsequential on their own but capable of serving as the building blocks of something much more significant. Also, once you know how to manipulate them, they hold astounding power (for good or ill).
The book focuses on the way in which habits are built (or torn down)—the Four Laws of Behavior Change. Basically, if you want to habitualize a behavior, you find a way to 1) make it obvious, 2) make it attractive, 3) make it easy, and 4) make it satisfying. If you want to break a habit, you do this in reverse: 1) make it invisible, 2) make it unattractive, 3) make it hard, and 4) make it unsatisfying.
One of the more standout suggestions from the book came from the third law: Make it easy. One of the problems is that we often have desires that require significant difficulty especially relative to what we are currently doing—we want to run a marathon or wake up at 5:30 AM every morning or become an A student or write a book (or whatever your large goals in life may be). The problem is that these goals seem so large and daunting and distant from where your life is now that you never take any actions toward them. Or you go extremely hard at the hard work for a little while, buoyed by motivation, until you inevitably hit the first deep dip in the motivation curve and find the new radical behavior change unsustainable.
The problem is that big goals require lots of consistent hard work often over a long period of time—something that’s not going to happen if you never take any action at all or maintain a sprint-and-burnout relationship with them. The solution to this problem, this problem of never getting consistent work done toward the big, hard thing, is to get the habit established with the easier version of that goal possible. Or, perhaps the better way of thinking about it is to deconstruct the process for achieving the big goal and start by making a habit of the easiest version of the first step you can arrive at. The process starts by thinking of a continuum of habits from hardest to easiest related to your goal: Running a marathon would be the hardest, running a 5k would less hard but still hard, running for 10 minutes would be easyish but still take some effort. But at the easiest level is running for a few minutes or, even, just putting on your running shoes to prepare for a run. Start with one of these last two very easy things and make a habit out of it. Do it every day until you do it without thinking about it and you start to get antsy if you risk not doing it.
Clear calls this the Two Minute Rule, or, the idea that you create a gateway habit for a more complex and effortful goal that takes two minutes or less. This could be the example of a two-minute run (or just putting on running shoes!) every day, reading a page of a book in bed each night, practicing Bulgarian for two minutes a day, or doing one push-up a day.
It often seems to many folks like new spiritual practices only come in the “run a marathon” degree of effort. People wonder how they’ll fit in the time or maintain their attention long enough to pray or read the Bible every day. And that’s compounded by the fact that the immediacy of the sacred in these acts makes people think they can only engage in them if they do them errorlessly. Getting into a rhythm of doing regular spiritual disciplines seems perfectly engineered to let the perfect continually remain the enemy of the good (or the ever getting done at all!).
So I’d suggest rather than putting off starting a new spiritual discipline, do a Two Minute Rule version. If you want to start praying the Daily Office, or any other more involved form of daily prayer, start by praying for just two minutes a day or less. Perhaps you lift up one joy, one concern, and one petition to God. Perhaps you say just the Lord’s Prayer or the Prayer of St. Chrysostom, but you commit to saying it every day at the same time.
You can use the Two Minute Rule for Bible verse memorization too. Rather than saying you’re going to memorize 100 verses or whole books of the Bible, commit to one verse a week or even a month. In this case, you commit to one verse for these relatively low-stress intervals, but you commit to looking over the verse every day during that period and picking up a new one the next week or month.
Finally, you can use the rule to build a habit of reading the Bible daily. Commit to reading for no more than two minutes or even to just reading one verse a day. But, since the point is to get into a regular habit, you have to actually stick to doing this once a day and probably at the same time each day. Moreover, since you want this habit to be a gateway to more extensive and effortful practice, you should prime yourself for that. Create a ritual of taking the Bible out, opening it, finding the verse, and reading it from the Bible—even if it’s just one verse at a time. Then, when you start wanting to read more, you’ll already have developed the habit of reading from the Bible itself.
The Two Minute Rule doesn’t need to just be for people who want to establish a new habit—it can be really helpful for maintaining habits too. Clear talks about the importance of consistency with engaging in the behavior you want to be habitual, making sure to do it on your predetermined frequency even if that means doing a really suboptimal or bad job on some days. You can maybe shake off a one-day lapse, but you need to do everything you can to avoid adding another lapse to it if you want to build and keep the habit. Thus, a two-minute spiritual disciple practice can be helpful for people accustomed to longer periods of prayer or scripture reading, a tool deployed on those days when you’re so pressed for time that you’re tempted to just skip prayer altogether because you don’t have enough time to do the whole thing.
The purpose of the Two Minute Rule is, of course, not to remain at two minutes forever. Once the gateway becomes a full-blown habit, look for ways to start increasing the time and effort spent with the desired behavior. Move from two to ten minutes of prayer. Move from a verse to a chapter. What’s interesting, though, is it’s likely that you’ll want to start increasing your time. Two minutes of bible reading is unlikely to let you read whole stories, and you’ll find yourself wanting to complete sections you’re reading. You’ll find there are more things you want to pray for. By starting so small and increasing the size of your rate at an easy rate, you’ll be unlikely to hit the point of real frustration or boredom. By stopping every day at a point where you’re still invested, you’ll keep wanting to come back for more.
After an initial read, Atomic Habits seems to be the kind of book that will offer some helpful aids to devotional and church life at several points. Without having tried much from the book (although I had intentionally or not already implemented some of the suggestions before reading, and they all work well), I think it’s worth engaging in its entirety. However, even if you don’t borrow or buy a copy and read the whole thing, I hope you feel emboldened to use this minimally effortful strategy to tackle a spiritual discipline you’ve been putting off because its full-blown version always seemed too intimidating.
Productivity & Goal Setting Posts
