I don't know where I got off thinking I could make a daily practice of anything with the day job making my reading & writing time a bit more valuable these days. Still, I labor on. And with that, here's a nearly-daily effort at clipping a few words from Eugene Peterson's "Eat This Book."

(pg. 48-49)

We live today in a world impoverished of story; so it is not surprising that many of us have picked up the bad habit of extracting "truths" from the stories we read; we summarize "principles" that we can use in a variety of settings at our discretion; we distill a "moral" that we use as a slogan on a poster or as a motto on our desk. We are taiught to do this in our schools so that we can pass examinations on novels and plays. It is no wonder that we continue this abstracting story-mutilating practice when we read our Bibles. "Story" is not serious; "story" is for children and campfires. So we continuously convert our stories into the "serious" speech of information and motivation. We hardly notice that we have lost the form, the form that is provided to shape our lives largeley and coherently. Our spirituality-shaping text is reduced to disembodied fragments of "truth" and "insight," dismembered bones of information and motivation.

Again: the way the Bible is written is every bit as important as what is written in it: narrative - this huge, capacious story that pulls us into its plot and shows us our place in its development from beginning to ending. It takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible. Every sentence is embedded in story and can no more be understood accurately or fully apart from the story than any one of our sentences spoken throughout the course of the day can be understood apart from our relationships and culture and the various ways in which we speak to our children and parents, our friends and enemies, our employers and employees - and our God.