Nancy Duarte · LifeOnEarthMinistries · Bible Chicks Teacher
A personal reflection on forty years of faith, the distractions of a digital world, and why Psalm 119:33–40 may be the most important passage you read today.
Nancy Duarte | LifeOnEarthMinistries · Bible Chicks · LifeCoachNancy.com
I was twenty years old when I became a Christian. And I remember, with a clarity that forty years has not dimmed, the moment someone put a Bible in my hands and told me to read it. Not just to know it. To live inside it.
I still have that first Bible. It is worn in the way that only a well-loved book can be worn, pages marked, margins written in, passages underlined in the particular handwriting of a twenty-year-old girl who was just beginning to understand that the words on those pages were not just ink. They were alive. They were speaking directly to her. To me.
When I go back and open that Bible today, when I find the passages I highlighted all those years ago, when I read the notes that young woman left herself in the margins, I am struck by the joy that comes off the pages. Not just the memory of it. The actual joy, still present, still radiating from those underlined words. She knew something about that twenty-year-old. She knew that the Word was not a burden. It was a gift.
I am writing this today because I want to talk about what happens when we forget that. When life gets loud, the gift gets set aside. When we drift, quietly, gradually, without realizing it, from the thing that anchors us more than anything else in this world.
Forty years later, the world has changed. The Word has not.
When I first became a Christian, reading the Bible was not just encouraged. It was the foundation of everything. Your Bible study. Your church. Your quiet time. Your daily bread. There was no Google. No app. No sermon on demand. No social media flooding your feed with devotionals, Bible verses, and Christian content. If you wanted to know what the Word said, you opened the Word.
Now, forty years later, I look around at the landscape, and I am genuinely amazed. You can access the Bible in hundreds of translations with the tap of a finger. You can listen to it read aloud on your morning walk. We just celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Bible being read aloud publicly, out loud, in the open, in a world that once made that a dangerous act. What God has done is extraordinary.
And yet, with more access to the Word of God than any generation in history, I am watching believers drift from it. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But quietly, gradually, the way you drift from any relationship when you stop showing up to it. The Bible becomes the app you mean to open. The chapter you plan to read. The passage someone posted that you double-tapped and scrolled past. The gift was unwrapped but unread.
Here is what I have learned in forty years: You can be surrounded by content about God and still be starving for God Himself. You can follow every Christian account, listen to every podcast, attend every service, and still not know Him. Because knowing Him requires the one thing the digital world cannot give you. Time. Stillness. Your eyes on His Word and nothing else.
The excuses we tell ourselves — and the truth underneath them
I have heard every reason. I have probably used a few of them myself in seasons of busyness. They sound like this:
“It is too long.” Yes. It is. It is sixty-six books written over thousands of years. You do not have to read it all at once. You just have to begin.
“I do not have the time.” We have the time for what we prioritize. But I also know this: the women I have walked with who make time for the Word are not the ones with more hours in the day. They are the ones who decided the Word was worth rearranging the day for.
“I will not understand it. That is for pastors and scholars.” This one breaks my heart a little because it is the enemy’s most effective lie. He wants you to believe the Word is not for you. But Psalm 119 was written by an ordinary person crying out to God for understanding. Not performing a scholarship. Crying out. And God met him there. He will meet you there, too.
“Teach me, Lord, the way of your decrees, that I may follow it to the end. Give me understanding, so that I may keep your law and obey it with all my heart. Direct me in the path of your commands, for there I find delight.”— Psalm 119:33–35 (NIV)
Did you catch that? Teach me. Give me understanding. Direct me. This is not the prayer of a scholar. This is the prayer of someone who knows they need help and is not too proud to ask for it. That posture, not expertise, just hunger, is all God requires.
The danger nobody talks about: what happens when you drift
When you ignore the Word of God, not dramatically, not intentionally, but gradually, through busyness and distraction, something happens that you may not even notice at first.
You begin to drift.
Not away from church necessarily. Not away from the language of faith. But away from the anchor. And because the drifting is so gradual, you often do not feel it until something happens, a crisis, a loss, a fear that will not leave, and you reach for the anchor and realize with a cold shock that you are further from it than you thought.
The signs of drifting that are easy to miss
You find yourself making decisions based on what feels right rather than what the Word says.
Anxiety, worry, and fear begin to feel normal rather than things you bring to God through His Word
You know what other people say about God more than you know what God says about Himself
The Word feels distant when once it felt alive and personal
You are living the Christian life by trying to figure it out, rather than referring to the Word God gave you
You feel spiritually dry but cannot quite identify why
This is what 1 Peter 2:2 speaks to — “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.” A baby does not have to be convinced to crave milk. The craving is built in. The Word of God is your spiritual sustenance. When you stop feeding on it, you do not stay the same. You weaken. You drift. You lose your footing without always knowing why.
The reward that surprises everyone who tries it
Reading, studying, and applying the Word of God may feel like a sacrifice at first. Especially in a world that is pulling your attention in ten thousand directions. But here is what happens, and I have watched it happen in my own life and in the lives of every woman I have walked alongside for four decades.
You start. Just five minutes. Just one chapter. Just one passage. And something wakes up. The Word does what only the Word can do: it gets inside you. It speaks to things you did not know needed to be spoken to. It finds the fear you had been managing and replaces it with a peace that makes no logical sense. It finds the question you could not ask and answers it before you finish the page.
You begin to know your Savior better. Not as a concept. As a person. As the living God who breathed the words on those pages and who breathes them still into the heart of every woman who opens them with even the smallest willingness.
The world does not get less crazy. The worries do not all disappear. The hard things do not stop being hard. But you carry them differently. Because you are not carrying them alone. Because you know, from the Word, from the promises in the margins of that worn-out Bible, that the One who holds the world holds you too.
Turn my eyes away from worthless things; preserve my life according to your word.— Psalm 119:37 (NIV)
That is my prayer for you today. Open your Bible. Even just for five minutes. The twenty-year-old girl who made notes in the margins of her forty years ago would tell you, you will not regret a single second of it.
A prayer for the woman reading this today
Lord, I come to You today on behalf of every woman reading these words.
For the woman who has drifted, who picked up her phone more often than her Bible this week, who has felt spiritually dry without fully understanding why, meet her right here. Right now. Let this be the turning point she did not know she needed.
For the woman who is afraid the Word is not for her, who believes it is too complex, too ancient, too scholarly for a woman like her, speak to that lie directly. You did not give us Your Word to confuse us. You gave it to sustain us, to guide us, to anchor us in every storm. Let her feel the truth of that today.
For the woman carrying worry, anxiety, and fear, who has been trying to figure out her life without the instruction manual You provided, show her gently that the answers she has been searching for everywhere else have been waiting in Your Word all along.
And for the woman who opens her Bible today for the first time in a long time, or perhaps for the very first time, let her feel what I felt at twenty years old. The joy of it. The aliveness of it. The profound and personal love of a God who breathed these words for her.
Teach us, Lord. Give us understanding. Direct us in the path of Your commands. For there, and only there, we find true delight.
In the name of Jesus, who is the Word made flesh, we pray.
Amen.
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