Young people, young Christians, young pastors: “Read! Read! Read some more!”

“Write this down,” said God to Moses and various prophets, as recorded in Holy Scripture.  If He wanted His story written, God surely intended it to be read.

I’m a reader.  I’m sure my mind exaggerates, but as a preteen, I recall feeling that I had read all the books in the Winston County Library in Double Springs, AL.  Furthermore, in those days, public libraries had bookmobiles–trucks equipped with small libraries, which made the rounds of the rural countryside.  It was a great arrangement.

Both my sons are avid readers; my daughter not so much. The reason:  We read constantly to our boys when they were little, but our daughter came to us from Korea when she was five. Sadly we missed those most influential years.

The sharpest people you know are readers; the dullest never crack a book.  My parents both read constantly. There was never a time in my growing up years when we did not take the newspaper, and sometimes more than one. In 2007, when God took our Dad the family had to cancel a half dozen subscriptions to magazines he was taking.  He was nearly 96.

At the moment, my bedside table holds books on Herbert Hoover, Leadership in Turbulent Times, The Battle of Britain, and the history of the Natchez Trace.  Six months ago, the list would have been composed of all westerns, and a week or two later several crime or mystery novels.  In my “office” (which looks a lot like our breakfast room!) to the left of the laptop are three study books on Revelation.  We are running over with books around here.  And I love it.

In her book, Leadership In Turbulent Times, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells how several presidents came to develop their gifts for influencing others and leading the nation.  Early on, with Abraham Lincoln, there was a love for books. She writes:

Left on his own, Abraham had to educate himself.  He  had to take the initiative, assume responsibility for securing books, decide what to study, become his own teacher.  He made things happen instead of waiting for them to happen. Gaining access to reading material proved nearly insurmountable.  Relatives and neighbors recalled that Lincoln scoured the countryside to borrow books and read every volume “he could lay his hands on.” A book was his steadfast companion.  Every respite from the daily manual tasks was a time to read a page or two from Pilgrim’s Progress or Aesop’s Fables, pausing while resting his horse at the end of a long row of planting. 

Then, Goodwin says about his technique:

Some leaders learn by writing, others by reading, still others by listening.  Lincoln preferred reading aloud in the presence of others.  “When I read aloud,” Lincoln later explained, “two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better.”  Early on, he possessed a vivid sensibility for the music and rhythm of poetry and drama;  he recited long stanzas and passages from memory.  When the time came to return the borrowed books, he had made them his own. 

I’m recalling the Apostle Paul told young Pastor Timothy, “Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture.…” (I Timothy 4:13).  Since people typically were unable to own scrolls and parchment in those days, they had one way and one way only to know Scripture:  When they came together, someone opened a scroll and began reading.  This is why we’re told, “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God” (Romans 10:17).

One of the best things a worship leader can do in a service is to read the Word of God aloud.  But he/she must do it well. That will require thorough preparation, careful enunciation, not rushing through, but treating these words as the jewels and treasures they are.  We remind pastors that what they read from The Book is far more important than what they will say about it!

Historian Goodwin spoke of Theodore Roosevelt‘s love for reading:

While asthma weakened young Roosevelt’s body, it indirectly spurred the development of an already precocious mind.  “From the very fact that he was not able originally to enter into the most vigorous activities,” his younger sister Corinne, noted, “he was always reading or writing” with a most unusual “power of concentration.”  There was nothing ordinary about his intellectual vitality, his curiosity, or his ambitious dream life.  Under the guiding eye of his father, who ceaselessly encouraged his son’s intellectual and spiritual development (as opposed to Abraham Lincoln’s father who would jerk a book from the boy’s hand and rebuke him for wasting his time–Joe), Teedie became a ferocious reader, transporting himself into the lives of the adventurous heroes he most admired–men with extraordinary bodily strength, who were fearless in battle, explorers in Africa, deerslayers living on the edge of the wilderness.  When asked years later whether he knew the characters in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, he laughed: “Do I know them? I have bunked with them and eaten with them, and I know their strengths and weaknesses.” 

Whereas Lincoln had to scrounge for books, young TR had no trouble there….

Few young children read as broadly or had such access to books as young Roosevelt.  He had only to pick a volume from the shelves of the vast library in his family’s home or express interest in a particular book and it would magically materialize.  During one family vacation, Teedie proudly reported that he and his younger brother and sister, Elliott and Corinne, had devoured fifty novels!  Thee (the father’s nickname) read aloud to his children in the evenings after dinner….. The effortless way Teedie secured hundreds of books provides stark contrast with the six-mile trek of Abraham to borrow Kirkham’s English Grammar, a comparison made brutal by superimposing Thee’s constant endeavors to feed Teedie’s reading with the image of Thomas Lincoln tearing books from Abraham’s grasp.  Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt “the greatest of companions.”  Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.

Recently, a friend who was visiting the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, bought and gifted me with a new biography of this interesting man (Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times).  I realized quickly that, like most people, I imagine, I had seriously underestimated Hoover, unable to get past the poor leadership he provided the nation during the early years of the Great Depression.  But prior to his presidency, Hoover, who had come from nowhere and nothing, vigorously remade himself into an overachiever of the first order.  Biographer Kenneth Whyte speaks of young Hoover’s reading:

Miss Gray (his teacher) invited Herbert to the Salem lending library, an adventure he readily embarked on…. He began to see literature as a living thing, and he would develop a serious lifelong reading habit, growing up to quote Milton: “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” 

In his book on the American spirit, David McCullough reports that in giving the baccalaureate address at the University of Massachusetts, he urged the audience to get a copy of University President William M. Bulger‘s book “While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics” if for no other reason than to read one paragraph on page 19.  I went online and bought the book.  Here is the paragraph:

A second seminal influence was the fact that I came into great wealth at an early age: I discovered books.  Almost from the beginning of that windfall, that unguided adventure, when I had to read with a dictionary open beside me to look up the words, I was deeply moved.  I realized I had found something of the greatest value. What began as an infatuation rapidly escalated to an almost febrile addiction. (Look it up! –Joe)  The more I read, the more I wanted to read–trivia, trash and classics, the lot; it was all one to me at the start, some of it utterly useless, much of it beyond my ken….  I have rarely relied on spirits to raise my spirit, but I know what drunkenness is, because I became drunk on books, an intoxication from which I never sobered, nor ever wanted to. 

Okay, more than one paragraph.  He continued….

Books took me to worlds never hinted at by Father Dwyer. They often disturbed me and made me long for something I could not identify or perhaps someone I had yet to meet. They produced a contrapuntal sense of exhilaration and optimism.

Sometimes I found that books filled my head with vast and stunning thoughts. They seemed so novel that I wondered whether anyone else had ever thought such thoughts before. They came like storms whirling through my mind, leaving me uncomfortably embarrassed when normality returned.  

Finally, a word to those who have not developed such a great habit for books…

–Go to your public library and browse through the stacks.  Pull a few books off the shelves and sit at a table looking them over.  Feel free to leave them on the table when finished; the librarians count the number of such books and report to people who wonder if these facilities are being used.

–Take a half dozen books home with you.  Feel free to read a few pages and then decide that one is not for you.  Never feel a compulsion to finish a book.  (My practice with a novel is usually to give the author a hundred pages. If I’m not hooked by then, that’s it.)

–If your church has a library or media center, visit it.  Encourage others to use it also.

–Have a couple of books in your car for those spare times when you are stuck in traffic, when you have an hour to kill waiting for someone or something, or when you need a great lunch companion.

–Read widely.

Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 thoughts on “Young people, young Christians, young pastors: “Read! Read! Read some more!”

  1. Greater anointing sir.I’m blessed through your messages and will love to receive messages from ur mails.Thanks.

    • We have no mails, sir. Best way to read our writings is to visit this website http://www.joemckeever.com. Scroll down the page for a list of categories. There are a couple of thousand articles here, most directed to pastors and other church leaders. Every blessing to you.

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