{"id":1949,"date":"2017-07-17T08:35:34","date_gmt":"2017-07-17T13:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/?p=1949"},"modified":"2017-07-17T21:01:56","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T02:01:56","slug":"transformed-by-the-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/2017\/07\/17\/transformed-by-the-bible\/","title":{"rendered":"Transformed by the Bible"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is my newest piece for incourage<\/a>.
\nYou can read the whole article here<\/a>!<\/p>\n

\"How<\/p>\n

I was twenty years old, fresh into my junior year at my Christian college, when Dr. Dorsett \u2014 an aging professor with a shock of white hair and thick spectacles \u2014 startled me into paying attention.<\/p>\n

He held a Bible above his head and asked us, \u201cHow can you call yourself a Christian if you haven\u2019t read every page of this book? If you don\u2019t even know what\u2019s in here?\u201d<\/strong> His tone was kind, but his words were piercing. He was asking us to own our faith.<\/p>\n

His words dumbfounded me.<\/p>\n

I had grown up in the church, and had read parts of the Bible during my growing-up years. But here, as a young woman, I realized that I hadn\u2019t ever read the Bible cover-to-cover. I\u2019d read bits here and chapters there, but I hadn\u2019t read much of the Old Testament, and I\u2019d never read all of the New. It dawned on me, there in that class, that I was basing my life on a book that I hadn\u2019t fully read \u2014 and suddenly, that admission stunned me. Who bases their life on a book but doesn\u2019t read all of it? Did I even know what I believed?<\/strong><\/p>\nWho bases their life on a book but doesn\u2019t read all of it? Did I even know what I believed? <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n

And so, that very week, I started a one-year Bible-reading plan and began my journey into reading the Bible all the way through.<\/p>\n

At first, reading several chapters a day felt overwhelming \u2014 going from reading a few verses here and there to actually reading whole chunks of the Word felt like going from talking a walk around the block to training for a marathon. My spiritual muscles were weak, and it was difficult on many days to keep my mind and heart engaged. Don\u2019t even get me started on the book of Numbers; it\u2019s a miracle I kept going!<\/p>\n

But what I found, as I kept my nose in the folds of those crinkly, thin pages of my Bible, was that I was meeting God\u2014actually meeting<\/em> with Him!<\/strong> I wasn\u2019t solely reading about Him or learning about Him: I was encountering the Lord on every page.<\/p>\n

You can read the rest of the article here, at incourage<\/a>!<\/p>\n

\"Still<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is my newest piece for incourage. You can read the whole article here! I was twenty years old, fresh into my junior year at my Christian college, when Dr. Dorsett \u2014 an aging professor with a shock of white hair and thick spectacles \u2014 startled me into paying attention. He held a Bible above […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[668,117,946,778,948,947,504],"class_list":["post-1949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ann-swindell","tag-author","tag-bible-reading","tag-christian-writer","tag-transformed-by-the-bible","tag-transformed-by-the-word","tag-writing-for-incourage","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/How-Reading-the-BibleWill-Tranfsorm-You.jpg?fit=800%2C1200&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1949"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2459,"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949\/revisions\/2459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annswindell.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}