I remember how it happened for me. It began with me asking my Grandmother for a Bible shortly after I gave my life to Christ at the age of nine. It was a NIV Thomson Chain and it is still the one that I read devotionally to this day. The first book of the Bible that I read was James. I believe that it was here that I gained my understanding of faith with feet. That what we believe needs to connect with real life problems of class and poverty. I then turned to the book of Revelation. All I can say is that at the age of nine it literally scared the hell out of me!<\/p>\n
I stopped reading the scriptures for a few months.<\/p>\n
But I couldn’t stay away for long for they spoke to me. I made a decision to read the whole Bible. It took me a couple of years and much of it I didn’t understand but I was enthralled with it. I made notes in the margins, looked up the cross-references and over time began to understand how it was put together. Reading the scriptures became habit for me. I would read them in the morning and took my Bible with me to school to get a glimpse of it at lunchtime. I would then read it in my room before bed, often times falling asleep with it in my hands.<\/p>\n
This was my classical phase. <\/p>\n
I think that a classical phase must precede a jazz-shaped faith. Before we can improvise and syncopate we must first learn to play the scales of the faith.<\/p>\n
It was a time of learning the basic chords and structures of scripture. It was a season of noticing the nuances. By the time I was sixteen I had a good understanding of a lot that was in this magnificent book, but I wouldn’t say that I understood it let alone knew how it was to uniquely live through me.<\/p>\n
Finding my voice was still to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember how it happened for me. It began with me asking my Grandmother for a Bible shortly after I gave my life to Christ at the age of nine. It was a NIV Thomson Chain and it is still the one that I read devotionally to this day. The first book of the Bible…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"yoast_head":"\n