Short essays on reading Scripture slowly, honest questions about the Christian life, and devotional reflections. Newest first.

  1. 5 min read

    Reading the Bible in a year

    A year-long Bible plan can become a box-ticking grind or a genuine encounter with the whole story of Scripture. The difference is not willpower but what you are reading for.

  2. 4 min read

    Baptism, plainly

    Baptism gets argued about more than it gets understood. Beneath the disagreements about who and how lies a single picture the New Testament keeps returning to: union with Christ in his death and resurrection.

  3. 4 min read

    Reading Isaiah slowly

    Isaiah is long and strange and easy to abandon. Read slowly, it moves from holiness to comfort to a suffering servant — and Jesus said it was about him.

  4. 5 min read

    The nearness of God in suffering

    When suffering comes, the urgent question is rarely 'why' in the abstract. It is whether anyone is near. Scripture's answer is not a tidy explanation but a person — a God who draws close to the brokenhearted and who knows sorrow from the inside.

  5. 4 min read

    Reading the Bible in the morning

    Morning Bible reading is often sold as a rule that good Christians keep and the rest of us fail. It is better understood as a gift on offer — and grace, not guilt, is what makes it last.

  6. 4 min read

    What 'covenant' actually means

    Covenant is not a dusty technical term but the shape of the whole Bible: a binding relationship God himself initiates, running from Abraham to the cross, where it is sealed in Jesus' blood.

  7. 4 min read

    Reading 1 Corinthians 13 slowly

    The love chapter has been worn smooth by weddings. Read in its place, it is a bracing challenge to a quarrelling church — and a portrait of Christ himself.

  8. 5 min read

    Waiting well

    Waiting feels like wasted time, the dead stretch between where you are and where you want to be. Scripture treats the long in-between as something else entirely — not empty, but the very place where hope is formed.

  9. 4 min read

    Keeping a Scripture journal

    A Scripture journal is not a diary and not a homework assignment. It is a pen put to the simple work of noticing — and noticing turns out to be how reading deepens.

  10. 4 min read

    What 'repentance' actually means

    Repentance is not grovelling or mere regret. The biblical word means a change of mind that turns you around — and in Jesus' telling, it looks less like punishment and more like coming home.