A couple of years ago I decided it was time to read the Bible.  I’m rarely content with a vague objective like “reading” the Bible.  (What did that mean?  Is that a few pages?  A few books?)  Vague objectives also cause me to lose focus.  As Homer Simpson once said, “that dog has a puffy tail.”  I decided that what I needed was to set a goal of reading the Bible in 1 year.  Now at the start of a year that sounds like a lot of time!  In fact it was only 5 pages a day based on my Bible.  But life has a way of distracting you.   And 5 pages a day was occasionally hard to hit.

I began to skip days for a bunch of reasons (work, travel, laziness).  But I still had this goal.  I still wanted to read the Bible in a year so I could say I accomplished something.  As the months went on I often found myself reading just to “get it done.”  That’s not always bad of course.  Sometimes you just need to discipline yourself to accomplish something.  That’s especially true when you’re easily distracted!  I think God was okay with those days.

But other days I found myself reading a passage that really had meaning for my life.  On these days it was as if God was using the Bible to speak to me.  So what did I do?  I powered through those verses because I needed to hit that magic number of 5 pages.  And I think God was no so pleased by that.

God never asks us to do anything without having a purpose in mind.  We’re never told to do something “just because.”  There is always a reason behind what God asks us to do.  On those days I forgot the real purpose of reading the Bible.  It wasn’t to accomplish something.  It wasn’t to read 5 pages a day.  It wasn’t to finish a book on time.  It was to learn more about who God was, and how he loved me.  My goals, which started out as a good thing, quickly took a turn for the worse, and became a hindrance for my relationship with God.

I have no idea how many things God wanted to teach me and instead of listening to him, I got up and walked away.  What have I lost by focusing on my limited time and by “goal” instead of focusing on what really mattered?  I may never know.

I still plow through things.  I still don’t always slow down and listen to what God has to say.  I’m still too time crunched.  But there are days when I’m able to stop reading and just listen.  And I think on those days I grow closer to God than when I worry about reading my 5 pages.

Whenever I’m too busy doing “godly things” to spend time with God, it means my priorities are messed up.  When it comes down to it, God is more interested in having a relationship with us than having us do something because it looks good.