Sometimes You Have to Break the Spine

I recently discovered a trick to more pleasurable reading of my NIV DAILY SCRIPTURE paperback. No, it’s not how much I read daily. Nor is it what time of the day I read it.

I discovered I needed to break the spine of this paperback so it would lie flat to allow me to read it more comfortably and also to write notes on the pages. That may not sound like a big deal to you; but to me it was a grand revelation! So grand that I’ve texted this information to those who I gave copies last Christmas.

My message was, “To make the paperback I gave you easier to read, you need to break the spine in multiple (20 or more) places so it will lie flat.”

I think there’s also a philosophical twist to this discovery. Information washes over all of us many times every day; it spills in. Then it spills out. And sometimes we respond to it like an automaton—a mechanical robot.

(Automaton image from Pixabay robot-7615434-1280)

How much better we would be to READ, REFLECT, and then RESPOND. Just as I broke the spine of this paperback in order to read it more easily, sometimes it helps to reorient our thinking to better understand others.

Allow me to make a disclaimer as I publish this blog post: breaking the spine on a NIV DAILY SCRIPTURE paperback works because of the way it is bound. Your other paperbacks will probably fall apart if you subject them to this exercise!