This is Part 3 of Holy Habits for Headspace – read about it here.

I’m at my desk under the stairs in the playroom with the plastic fire truck at my feet. I light a candle not to be weird but just because I love candles and I want this to be time set apart and I want to be light in this house and on this planet.

I’m reading the Bible in a year because I have no job and no excuse. Some days it’s easy – two psalms or a few chapters of Matthew. Some days it’s thick-sludge trudging through prophets and genealogies. But every day it’s God-breathed, I remind myself, and he wouldn’t have put it in here if he didn’t have good reason and I’ll meet him on these pages if I look.

Today it’s Genesis. Old-school stories. I know them so well they’ve lost their meaning. But today I see them new.

God is patient (again) with the man who (again) says his wife is his sister and I think, hmm. Slow learner. Like – me.

God hears a boy crying thirsty in the desert. He’s not the boy of the promise but still there’s water and restoration.

Then God says,

‘Take your son, your only son – yes, Isaac, whom you love so much – ’

And it echoes back from another hill with the thud of metal in flesh because that’s what God did. He took his Son, his only Son – yes, Jesus, whom he loved so much –

And I think, what if God asked that of me? What if the thing to do was give up Cameron or Scott, for the human race? I know what I’d say.  I’d say, ‘Sorry, human race.’

But God did the unthinkable and now across the millennia I can say just what he said to Abraham on the mountain: ‘You have not withheld from me even your son, your only son.’

And I see that Abraham wept for his soul-mate lover when she died and how the foreigners respected his integrity so much that they blessed him in his grief with burial grounds and there’s this quaint thank-you-no-no-thank-you exchange and he ends up buying the field.

Which makes me think of another field that was bought for thirty pieces of silver but how the cosmic cost was astronomically more than that.

So I determine again today to make it my holy habit to:

Stay. In. The. Word.

Make it my urgent to-do. Find ways to keep it fresh. Even if I’m shattered and Scott’s nappy leaked in the night. I’ll find the plumb line that keeps me still and centred. I’ll meet with the King on the pages.

How do you find ways stay in the Word? Please leave a comment.

Candlelight pic: http://www.felcaustin.org/wp-content/uploads/candlelight.jpg