I’ve been doing a reading plan on the Bible app every day since January 1st, and have been very proud of my consistency with it. It’s given me such a dopamine hit each day pressing the tick at the end, and seeing my streak go up.
I started this because I’ve managed to successfully carve Duolingo into my everyday and now have a streak of 256 days. I figured if I can do it with learning Spanish, I can do it with reading some bible too!
Duolingo has some very smart developers – they’ve created these streak “freezes”, where if you miss a day, you have X amount of freezes you can use that will maintain the appearance of your streak despite actually missing the goal. And it absolutely works. I’ve been so proud of myself for sticking with it for so long – I think I have missed about three days in all – two of which were when were in Spain, so I feel like that didn’t count anyway!
Tom and I went to see Rend Collective a few weeks back and didn’t get home til just after midnight. I usually do both Duolingo and bible plan in bed at night, so this day, my Duo streak used a freeze, but my bible streak was lost!! I was gutted. I think I was up to 39 days, and my highest ever streak in the bible app is 65, so I was over half way to beating it. I suddenly felt very disenfranchised, losing that number.
How ridiculous is that?! I even did the bible reading before I went to sleep – it just was past midnight so it didn’t “count” for that day. But I genuinely felt a little meh about whether I then missed any more days after that.
I had to really give myself a mental shake to remember that the streak is not what I was doing it for! My faith has been a little neglected in the last few years – I started “deconstructing” things about Christianity and the church about 5/6 years ago, and just as I was starting to confidently reconstruct, my brainpower has been focussed on raising a child! I wanted to create a new habit of reading the bible every day to try and kick start that part of my spiritual life agin. So what did the number of days I’d been doing it matter? I was trying to connect to a deity, not data.
What’s the point of me reading scriptures every day if it’s literally just to say I’ve done it – even if that’s just to myself? Same goes for Duo – I can open the app and do the most basic exercise and achieve a great streak, but it doesn’t mean I’ll be able to speak or understand Spanish. Why would I do the same with the bible? I’m not reading it out of religiosity. That’s definitely not going to keep me coming back to it. It’s to connect with my Creator God, to understand his character, the stories, and his intentions for humanity and how we should live and love in reaction to all that. (NB I’m using “his” here out of regularity, I do actually mean Father, Son & Holy Spirit – God the Trinity, God of Creation – three persons, separate and in communion with one another, but culturally we still refer to God as one in that situation, and usually he/him/his. That makes me think of The Shack where God appears as Mother for a while. We should talk about that more as Christians – the feminine heart of God, the Mother Earth aspects, etc… I digress…)
I have continued my streak in the Bible, though it only says 24 days in my app, I am disregarding it, knowing that I am reading every day – connecting, ruminating, and digesting these words and stories passed down over hundreds of generations – for the wealth inside of it and not the number going up.
Hopefully by the end of the year – whether the statistics affirm it or not – I will have completed my reading plan, and therefore completed reading the New Testament, and I will also be able to hold a conversation in Spanish! Buenos suerte!
Ellen Wiggins 