A Rambling on about unfinished pages, beloved rereads, and the one book I will never truly be done with.

I have a complicated relationship with unfinished books. Not hostile, exactly. More like the relationship one has with exercise equipment bought in January… hopeful, slightly guilty, and occasionally dusted with good intentions.

There are books on my shelves wearing bookmarks like abandoned flags. There are books beside my chair I fully intend to return to, books stacked on nightstands with all the confidence of tiny paper skyscrapers, books downloaded and waiting in some digital corner with the quiet patience of saints. Each one arrived with a promise… here, take these tales, these dreams, these stories, this imagination. Let me pour a writer’s world into your mind, your heart, your soul.

And sometimes I did let them. Sometimes I opened the door and invited every chapter in. Other times, if I am being honest, I let them sit politely, gathering dust on a shelf or table while I got distracted by laundry, supper, worry, another book, or the grand human tradition of falling asleep after three paragraphs and pretending that counts as reading.

But unfinished does not always mean unloved. Some books are not abandoned because they failed us. Some are simply waiting for the version of us who can meet them properly. A book can be too dense for one season, too tender for another, too sharp for a bruised heart. There are stories I have left not because they were empty, but because I was.

Then there are the books I return to again and again, the ones with familiar rooms and old voices. They are less like books now and more like places I know how to find in the dark. I go back to them the way some people return to a porch swing, a kitchen table, a hymn, a recipe written in someone’s handwriting. They know me differently each time because I am different each time. The pages stay the same, but I do not.

For years, the book I used to admit I had never finished was the Bible. It felt almost a bit ridiculous to say, given that it had been present in my life longer than most things. It was read to me before I could read for myself. It was one of the books I learned to read from. Its stories were carried into me early, tucked into the folds of childhood, braided into songs, sermons, Sunday mornings, bedtime prayers, and all the mysterious ways language becomes memory before we understand how deeply it has rooted.

A few years ago, I remedied that. I read the whole Bible in a year. Not merely to check a box or earn some invisible gold star for spiritual productivity. I wanted to understand it, learn from it, absorb it. I wanted not only to know what was written there, but to feel it. To wrestle with it. To sit with it long enough for it to look back at me. To read it like an novel I have been drawn to.

And I did finish it, in the technical sense. Pages turned. Books completed. Beginnings met endings. Genesis found Revelation. The ribbon crossed the line.

But of all the books I have read, the stand-alone novels, the sagas, the trilogies, the series with maps in the front and family trees complicated enough to require prayer… the Bible is the one I can read again and again and never feel I have learned it all. So perhaps I did not finish it after all. Perhaps I never will.

I read it now in passages. I open it deliberately, and sometimes I open it almost randomly, searching for an answer to what I feel, what I want to understand, or what I need to know. I have never been disappointed—not because every page gives me what I expected, but because it so often gives me what I did not know I needed.

I have learned that I am not alone in its pages. I have found comfort there, yes, but also surprise. Reason. Empathy. Harsh reality. A kind of honesty that does not always smooth the rough edges but refuses to lie about them. And truth, always truth… even when it is not the truth I thought I was looking for, even when it does not arrive wearing the face I imagined.

Every day, I read passages from the Bible during my devotion time. Some days the words settle gently. Some days they challenge every comfortable little arrangement I have made inside myself. Some days they feel like bread. Some days like medicine. Some days like a mirror, which is shocking at times, but usually necessary.

That is the strange and beautiful thing about sacred reading, and maybe about all reading that matters. The best books are not simply complete. They continue. They follow us out of the chair and into the kitchen, the car, the difficult conversation, the quiet hour, the unexpected grief, the ordinary Tuesday. They do not stay closed just because we close the cover.

So yes, I have unfinished books. I have half-read novels, paused histories, essays waiting patiently for my attention, and stories I still mean to return to someday. I have books I reread because some part of me keeps needing to hear them or feel them again.

But the Bible—my first book, my daily book, my book of comfort and confrontation—is not truly finished,  and I suspect I never will be. I hope I never am…