Here’s the deal. I wasn’t raised in a Christian home. I didn’t grow up with the classic Bible stories or the Sunday School songs. I could, however, give you the entire plot of the original Star Wars trilogy and sing every 90s country song known to man.
To me, Christmas was basically forced interactions with extended family and a side of presents. Easter was this fever dream involving a candy-delivering bunny and a movie about an old guy parting the sea and yelling about letting his people go.
So when I say I walked into my first church service knowing nothing, I don’t mean “a little lost.” I mean I knew. NOTHING.
Youth Group: Where It All Started
I was 14 when I attended my first church service. My friend had spent a solid year bullying me into coming to youth group with her. I had no idea what to expect, but somehow I ended up loving it.
I genuinely cannot tell you a single thing the youth pastor taught that night. I can’t even explain why I liked it so much. The only thing I remember is that he said reading your Bible was really important.
Did he explain why? Possibly. If he did, I was probably distracted by a cute boy.
But teenage me lived in a very black-and-white universe, so “you should read your Bible” instantly translated to “this is the rule.” And if I was going to keep showing up to youth group, I needed to follow the rule.
Side note: My early years with Jesus were… legalistic.
Not because anyone explicitly taught me that. I still follow that youth pastor on social media, and nothing about his preaching gives legalism. I’m convinced I did it to myself thanks to my ignorance and the environment I grew up in.
But that’s a different story for a different day.
The Great Bible Quest of 2004
The only problem was that I didn’t own a Bible. And I was genuinely terrified to ask my mom for one. Maybe because every Sunday morning she practically shoved me out the door so we could get to Kroger before the “church people” got out of their church service.
We lived in a small town, and there were more churches than restaurants, so there were lots of church people to dodge. If I asked why it was so necessary that we miss the church crowd, she’d tell me they were judgmental and rude.
So imagine my surprise when, in the plot twist of the century, my mom was thrilled when I asked if I could have a Bible.
Then I remembered she’d actually tried to get me to read the Bible years earlier… but the King James Version + my undiagnosed ADHD = absolutely not.
Apparently, she actually loved Jesus and was excited I wanted to learn about Him. Fourteen-year-old me was confused because the Jesus she claimed to love didn’t seem to match the life we were living. But that mystery would unravel in a later season.
My First Bible: The Tennessee Orange Special
We went to LifeWay that Saturday. I walked in with zero clue what I was looking for and was immediately assaulted by shelves of Bible choices. There is no telling how long I stood there staring at them feeling overwhelmed and terrified to pick the “wrong” Bible.
At some point, an employee must have stepped in and suggested the NIV, because my KJV-till-Jesus-calls-her-home mother would NEVER have recommended that herself.
I remember unboxing my brand new Teen Study Bible in the car. The cover was that weird fake leather in bright orange and red. And considering I had recently declared myself a Tennessee fan (nearly sending my Kentucky-loving father into cardiac arrest), choosing an orange Bible was basically spiritual rebellion.
A Very Confusing Place to Start…
I’ve always been a big reader, and car rides were prime reading time because agreeing on music in our family was a lost cause. Especially back then, when our options were whatever the radio felt like playing or our homegrown CD collection featuring the holy quartet of S Club 7, Aaron Carter, NSYNC, and a box-set of hits from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. A chaotic lineup if there ever was one.
After a few minutes of admiring the cover of my new Bible and skimming through a few pages to see what all the spiritual fuss was about, I did what any good reader does when starting a new book: I flipped to page one.
Imagine my exasperation when my mother told me not to start there.
What did she mean, don’t start at the beginning? I wasn’t a genius child, but the woman did invest in the entire Hooked on Phonics system to make sure I knew how books worked, and I was very confident that “start at the beginning” was Reading Rule #1.
Not to mention that I had the entirety of The Sound of Music memorized so I knew that Queen Julie Andrews herself had declared that the very beginning is a very good place to start.
But no. This woman told me to start with the New Testament because, and I quote, “The Old Testament is boring.” I didn’t have the faintest clue what Old or New Testament meant, but I did know I was not about to begin my new Jesus journey with something deemed “boring.”
So off to the New Testament I went.
This meant I flipped straight to Matthew 1. Which also means the very first verse I ever read in the Bible was: “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham.”
And then came a list of names I’d never heard of, spelled in ways I could not pronounce, attached to people I knew absolutely nothing about. If this was the supposedly “not boring” part of the Bible, I couldn’t imagine what horrors were waiting for me in the Old Testament.
I don’t remember exactly what went through my mind in that moment, but I’m confident the inner turmoil was real.
Still, I had a rule planted firmly in my very stubborn teenage brain: must. read. the Bible. So I kept going.
If I could survive the entirety of Huckleberry Finn, surely I could make it through this.
My Legalistic Quiet Time Years
And thus began my daily Bible reading journey.
I dug a half-used journal out of the abyss that was my bedroom so I could jot down anything “awe-inspiring” I came across because I refused to write in my Bible (the librarian told me not to write in books and by golly I wasn’t going to be breaking that rule).
The journal became the place where I’d jot down anything that sounded deep or important… even if I had no idea what it meant.
At youth group, every adult in existence seemed to be preaching the same sermon: read your Bible every day and have a quiet time with Jesus. So naturally, I took this as law.
Every single day, I plopped myself at my desk, opened my aggressively colored Bible, read one chapter, and wrote down a couple of thoughts that made me sound way more spiritually mature than I actually was.
Friends… that was my quiet time for years.
A chapter a day. Zero understanding. Just vibes.
I did look forward to the Psalms though. Ya girl could blitz some of those in 90 seconds and feel wildly accomplished.
The Time I Ghosted My Bible
And then one day… I just stopped.
There wasn’t a dramatic moment or a big crisis of faith. I simply closed my Bible and didn’t pick it back up. I can’t point to a specific reason, but I know there were a lot of worldly influences pulling at me, and I was listening to my own desires far more than the Holy Spirit.
After six years of the same quiet time routine, I think I finally hit a wall. Was I really supposed to keep rereading a book that barely made sense to me? Forever?
I didn’t dare say it out loud at the time, but most of Scripture felt dull to me, and I only forced myself through one chapter a day because it was the easiest way to avoid conviction at church.
And then one day… I just stopped. There wasn’t a dramatic moment or a big crisis of faith. I simply closed my Bible and didn’t pick it back up. I can’t point to a specific reason, but I know there were a lot of worldly influences pulling at me, and I was listening to my own desires far more than the Holy Spirit.
After six years of the same quiet time routine, I think I finally hit a wall. Was I really supposed to keep rereading a book that barely made sense to me? Forever?
I didn’t dare say it out loud at the time, but most of Scripture felt dull to me, and I only forced myself through one chapter a day because it was the easiest way to avoid conviction at church.
As long as I could check the “quiet time” box, I could convince myself I was spiritually fine, even though I absolutely wasn’t.
It was 2010 when I quit my daily Bible reading.
Somehow, in the strangest twist of Christian girl math, I was still leading small groups and even spent two summers working at a gospel-focused camp… while barely touching a Bible myself.
After I graduated from college in 2012, I drifted from church almost entirely.
Trying, Failing, Trying Again
Then in 2015, a mentor at work who I adored handed me a “Bible in a Year,” and because disappointing her would’ve crushed my soul, I tried to resurrect the quiet time habit.
But it was the same hollow routine as before… read a chapter, feel nothing, move on.
But every so often I would feel the Holy Spirit nudging me. I’d wander into Barnes & Noble, buy a new translation with a cuter cover, read it for approximately 1-3 business days, and then forget it existed.
Rinse, repeat, spiritually drift.
I had made my way back to church around 2017. And by made my way back to church, I mean that there weren’t many days that end in the letter y that I wasn’t there for some reason or other.
Don’t get it twisted. I did not have a Saul to Paul transformation.
It was more of a “if I show up to all the things I can trick myself (and hopefully everyone else) into thinking I’ve got my life together” situation.
My Unexpected Holy Plot Twist
Then 2022 hit with a plot twist that rocked me. I’ll unpack that another day, but the important part is this:
Jesus met me in the middle of my mess and led me back to His Word.
But this time… it clicked.
When God Sent Reinforcements
I had a trusted mentor leading the small group I was in, and she was the first person who actually made the importance of Bible study make sense to me.
She didn’t just tell me to read it; she showed me how she fell in love with Scripture and kept that passion alive year after year.
She said that the first thing she did was pray that God would give her a desire for His Word. She said that prayer was answered overnight.
When I prayed my own version of that prayer, the answer took a little longer, probably because the Lord had to chip through the concrete wall I’d put around my heart, but He eventually got through.
She also recommended using a solid commentary to help make sense of the passages. So naturally I went straight to Amazon and bought Warren Wiersbe’s Exposition Commentary set. He was born in 1929 and passed away in 2019, so some of his illustrations feel a little… vintage. But he explains Scripture in a way that finally made things click for me.
And, of course, because this is me, I made a pilgrimage to the bookstore for (yet another) new Bible to kick off this fresh attempt at actually studying God’s Word like I meant it.
Job. Because Why Not Start There?
My newest study acquisitions sat on the coffee table for days, staring at me like, “Girl… open us.”
I could feel the Holy Spirit nudging me to peel the plastic off those commentaries, but I kept making excuses and promising I’d start tomorrow.
I don’t remember what finally pushed me over the edge, but when I did decide to start, I had all 66 books of the Bible at my fingertips and somehow chose… Job.
A bold choice to say the least.
And absolutely not the book I usually recommend when someone asks where to start studying Scripture. But I’d heard the phrase “You’ve got the patience of Job” about a thousand times growing up, and patience was something I was severely lacking. So, naturally, I figured Job and I could bond over our mutual suffering.
So off to Job I went.
There’s no telling how long I sat there, completely locked in on the story of Job. It was the first time in my life that Scripture felt alive instead of boring. I remember texting my mentor in full shock, telling her I wished I didn’t have to work the next morning so I could stay up all night and keep reading Job’s story.
Hyper-fixation, but Make It Holy
For the next few months, all I wanted to do was study Scripture.
My alarm was set for 5:00 AM, but the Holy Spirit preferred to use my chaos-gremlin cat as an unsolicited wake-up call at 4:30.
Every morning I’d start with a deep dive into a Psalm. After work, I’d come home and study a completely different book of the Bible, sometimes two if I had successfully conned other people into doing a study with me.
I filled pages of my journal with prayers every night. I practically quit watching TV because I was so laser-focused on spending time with the Lord.
I say “obsessed,” but honestly, those extended quiet times were a means of survival in that season. Much like Peter walking on water, the moment I took my eyes off Jesus I felt like I was going to sink.
So I actually applied what I was reading in the Bible and used the Lord as my refuge and spent as many waking hours as I could with Him.
Three Years Later
In the three years since that first deep dive into Job’s story, my quiet time has had its fair share of ups and downs.
I do my best not to miss a day, not because of the legalistic rulebook my teenage brain invented, but because I genuinely want to hear what the Lord has to say.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t days when I have to encourage (force) myself to sit down with Him. Life gets busy, energy runs low, and, much like calling my mother, it can be frustrating when you desperately need wisdom or encouragement and He just does not seem to understand the urgency of your situation.
I’m not a theologian, and if there’s an official instruction manual for how to have a quiet time, mine definitely got lost in the mail. It took me almost twenty years to cobble together a toolkit that actually helps me spend intentional time with my Heavenly Father.
Would it have been nice if someone had told me all this sooner? Absolutely.
But Romans 8:28 is out here doing what Romans 8:28 does… working all my chaos together for my good and His glory.
Here’s Why I Just Trauma-Dumped My Testimony on You
My hope is that my story encourages someone to take their own first (or fiftieth) wobbly step toward studying Scripture.
My whole life is a collection of chaotic side quests powered by a love for Jesus, and getting into His Word is the one thing that consistently pulls me back from my own nonsense.
And really, that’s what Chaotically Devoted is all about, showing up as we are, trusting that Jesus can work with our chaos, and learning to walk with Him one imperfect step at a time.
Chaotically Devoted 