Do you have time for a story?

 In North America and the United States, we live in a very interesting time right now. We are coming out of a time period where many "knew" the basics of the Christian faith. They honored things like Sundays, and there may even have been a bit of a guilty conscience about not being regular at a church. However, those days are gone. Even Christians have a challenging time thinking about being regular at church, and we live among many who don't even know much about Jesus or about why we worship on Sunday. To them, it's just another day of the weekend.

That means that the story of God's work in this world is reaching a place where it is relatively unknown. People may know names like Moses, David, Jesus and Paul, but know relatively little about what the Bible says about them. Forget the parts where the inspired biblical authors describe faith and life, the story itself is not well-known.

Because we live in that context, it can make it challenging to carve out time to be reading God's story. Daily Bible time gets swallowed by the many opportunities for events and life that are ever-present around us. One of the great challenges for a Christian who wants to know more about God's story is simply finding the time to read it.

The past couple of days, I have introduced some short bible readings to help get us into a habit of reading. For the following posts, I propose that we start making some time for the story itself. It should take less than ten minutes a day to follow through with what I am suggesting, and I hope that it proves helpful.

We will start reading through the account of Jesus' life recorded by Mark. I am going to propose that we read a chapter a day. That way we aren't bogged down with too much, but as we work through it, we'll be continuous enough to get the flow of the story. As we walk through it, I'll also attempt to interject some facts about Mark and the story of Jesus that he tells. That way we not only get the story, but we get to know a little about what is behind the story.

I hope you'll join me on this journey. For just over the next two weeks, we'll follow Jesus on an interesting journey. You may even find that you have questions, and I encourage you to find some way to keep a record of them. If you are able, I'd love for you to pass them along to me. After all, the best stories are the ones we share and talk about.

So today, let's start with Mark 1. I'll even plan to keep this up over the weekend, so keep tuned in for those as well.