Do you read me?

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently…in myself. I’ve been a voracious reader since I first began to decipher those inky squiggles on a page at the age of four. I still buy a lot of books. But lately they seem to be piling up, unread. Some have a bookmark inserted after a chapter or two; others just lie there patiently, waiting to be conscripted into service. This is not like me. Why have my reading habits changed?
Is it because I spend so many hours looking at a computer screen? Or watching television shows which frequently cannot even keep me awake? Is it the video games or the Facebook or the iPhone? There are so many things competing for the time which was once reserved for reading.
It’s not just me. One Sunday, I was preparing the classroom for my 8:30 group. On a shelf was a stack of Bibles. I started to count them and found more than 25. Later, I looked in the other rooms at the Quads; each room had a similar number of orphaned Bibles. From the most modest paperback versions to the leather-bound, finger-indexed, gold-stamped-personalized study Bibles, it seemed to be an awfully large arsenal of abandoned swords, over a hundred of them.
Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” It’s extremely unlikely that the wisdom contained in a book on the table will disseminate through the air like your fancy plug-in air freshener and find its way into your noggin. How many of those abandoned Bibles are the result of someone thinking, “There’s nothing relevant or interesting in this book for me?”
Some of those people probably bogged down in Leviticus when they should have started in Acts. Or they wandered into Revelation and gave up the ghost—the three-headed, seven-horned ghost whose name is Babylon—and never went back. Maybe the translation was cryptic and outdated or the print was too small. I don’t know. What I do know is this: if you don’t read the instruction manual, you’re never gonna know what the possibilities are. The most powerful notions in human history can be recorded by black ink on a white page. But the power is only unleashed when the words are read and converted into action.