An impatient exegesis

I have come to terms that I can be deeply impatient when reading my Bible. If, for some strange reason, I haven’t come up with anything meaningful as I read, which happens more then I would like to admit, a curious sense of hysteria takes over. I become very cantankerous and irritable simply because I haven’t gotten anything from my Bible. I find it terribly ironic that some days I can become less and not more of a Christian as I read. I believe most of this is connected to my false expectations that I have imposed on God’s word itself, though my wife might suggest that I have some inherent problem that needs to be talked through.:) For what it’s worth, I have realized my irritability is more or less the result of a hopelessly selfish point of view: “my” set of expectations have not been met. This perception is a pernicious and complex web that I can get caught up in; unless, of course, I can get free from this deeply flawed point of view. But if my whole approach to reading God’s word is to get something out of it for me then I think I have missed the whole point. The ethical/cultural/theological dimensions wrapped up within the word discipleship, a word I’m not sure I or we comprehensively understand, explicitly calls us to think less of ourselves. And I really try hard to do that very thing, of course, through God’s grace. However, I find it bizarre that I apply this “thinking less of myself” ethic with regrettable selectivity. I choose to live this sort of thing out with people in meaningful ways, but when it comes right down to it, I forget to live this out in meaningful ways with God’s word. Obviously, I am guilty of compartmentalization and putting the cart before the horse. But the worse of it is that I have played selfish with God. The last thing I want to do is to succumbed to this wrong vision; this wrong hermenutical perspective. In fact, and again on more occasions then I would like to admit, I have fundamentally misunderstood what the Bible is really all about: It is not a Book that I can use for any old selfish reason; rather, it is a book that invites me to live within a greater story. So, I am now attempting a fresh exegetical approach to God’s word- it is more humble and patient and significantly less narcissistic. Hopefully, those days of hysteria are all over and done with…