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Today’s reading felt like walking into an entirely different kind of question. Genesis repeatedly showed people who lived through circumstances they did not understand and eventually looked backward and recognized God’s faithfulness.

Job begins somewhere more frightening: what happens when you are suffering and you cannot see the explanation at all?

Job is introduced as “blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil” (Job 1:1). That does not mean Job was sinlessly perfect. It...

I’m writing a dystopian novel called The Word 4 Murder, and the deeper I get into it, the more I realize that the story isn’t really about artificial intelligence. It’s about us.

The world of the novel has created a system called Axiom. It began by doing genuinely good things. It helped doctors treat patients, protected vulnerable people, identified danger, and solved problems human institutions were too slow or divided to handle. People trusted it because, for a long time, it deserved their...

Today’s reading felt like the completion of something that began when Joseph was seventeen. The brothers who once mocked his dreams now arrive in Egypt, bow before the governor, and have no idea that the man standing over them is Joseph. He recognizes them immediately. They do not recognize him. And Joseph remembers the dreams.

This is the moment Joseph could have fantasized about for years. The brothers who stripped him, threw him into a pit, ignored his pleas, and sold him are now...

Today’s reading made yesterday’s question feel much more real: What does it mean for God to be with us when everything around us looks like He isn’t?

Joseph is still in prison. Genesis does not tell us exactly how many of the thirteen years between being sold at seventeen and standing before Pharaoh at thirty were spent there, but by the time Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer and chief baker arrive, Joseph has already been entrusted with responsibility even inside his confinement. The captain of the...

Jacob is finally going home. Twenty years earlier, he left with almost nothing. He was running from Esau after deceiving Isaac, carrying a blessing he had tried to secure through manipulation. At Bethel, God met him in the wilderness and promised, “I am with you.”

Now Jacob is returning with wives, children, servants, livestock, and wealth. But before he can reach home, he has to face the brother he once ran from.

Genesis 32 begins almost strangely. The angels of God meet Jacob. He recognizes...

Today’s reading felt different because Genesis finally lets Jacob say out loud what the previous chapters only allowed us to watch.

Joseph has been born, and Jacob is ready to leave. He has already spent fourteen years working for Laban in connection with Rachel and Leah, and now he asks the question that exposes just how long he has been building someone else’s life: “And now, when shall I also provide for my own house?” — Genesis 30:30.

That line stayed with me.

Jacob arrived in Haran with...

Today’s reflection was shorter for me emotionally than some of the others, partly because I’m tired, and I take my autoimmune medication on Wednesdays. But I still wanted to keep doing what I started this project for: reading the Bible chronologically and letting the story unfold in front of me. I know where many of these people and themes eventually lead. But I do not want to constantly pull later Scripture backward and make Genesis say everything at once. I want to hear what Jacob would...

Yesterday left me with something hopeful. Isaac faced one of Abraham’s old problems—a barren wife, a promised future, years of waiting—and responded differently. Abraham and Sarah eventually tried to manufacture an heir through Hagar. Isaac pleaded with God and waited.

So I entered today thinking maybe this was going to be a story about the next generation doing better… Genesis immediately complicated that.

That may actually be one of the most realistic things Scripture has shown me so far. We...

After finishing the first week, today’s reading felt almost strangely short. Genesis 25 does not have the scale of the flood, the violence of Sodom, or the unbearable tension of Abraham walking Isaac up the mountain. Most of it is names, deaths, descendants, and the beginning of another generation. But maybe that is exactly why I needed to slow down.

Week One began with the question:

How does humanity come home?

Genesis still has not answered that. If anything, the first week showed me how deep...

Day seven felt different from the previous few days. The last stretch of Genesis has been emotionally exhausting: Hagar being used and mistreated, Sodom collapsing into collective violence, Lot carrying some of that corruption out with him, Abraham repeating the same cowardly deception with Abimelech, and then, finally, Isaac being born exactly when God said he would be. Today still contains some of the darkest material yet—a mother and son pushed into the wilderness, a father walking his son...

Day six did not make me start disliking Abraham and Sarah.

That started yesterday.

After reading what they did to Hagar—using a woman under their authority to solve their problem, then treating her harshly when the situation became complicated—I went into today’s reading already frustrated with them. And Genesis 18–21:7 did not exactly make that frustration disappear.

If anything, today made the characters more complicated. Sarah frustrates me. Abraham frustrates me. Lot horrifies me. Lot’s...

Day five left me thinking about one of the most human instincts I have seen in Genesis so far: what happens when we believe God, but then time passes and reality begins making His promise look impossible?

Before getting into Genesis 15–17, I had one lingering thought from the flood story that stayed with me this morning. If the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 really were rebellious heavenly beings who crossed a boundary with human women, I wondered whether part of the flood’s preservation of Noah’...

Before I get into Day 4, I want to explain what I am actually trying to do with these reflections.

I started this one-year chronological Bible plan partly because I wanted the accountability. Reading the assigned chapters is one thing. Knowing that afterward I am going to sit down, write through what I noticed, and make a short video about it forces me to slow down. I cannot skim four chapters, check a box, and tell myself I understood them. Writing makes me ask what the text actually said,...

Day three made me realize that the story of Noah is much harder than the version most of us were given as children.

When we are young, the ark can almost feel cheerful. There are animals walking two by two, rain falling outside, Noah standing faithfully at the center, and eventually a rainbow stretching across the sky. It becomes easy to forget what the story is actually describing.

A world dies.

That is what Genesis 7 forces you to confront if you stop reading it as a familiar story and try,...

Day two felt different from day one. Genesis 1–3 gave me creation, purpose, marriage, temptation, shame, blame, exile—the beginning of the human problem. But Genesis 4–6 felt like watching that problem spread.

The garden is gone, but humanity continues. People marry. Children are born. Crops grow. Animals are raised. Cities are built. Music is made. Tools are invented. Generations multiply. Life does not stop after Eden, but neither does sin.

And that may be the most unsettling part.

Genesis 3...

There is something strange about reading Genesis slowly when you already know the story. I woke up at 6 a.m. and knew what was coming before I opened the Bible: creation, Adam, Eve, the serpent, the fruit, the fall. These are stories many of us have heard since childhood, which can actually make them harder to read carefully. Familiarity makes us think we already understand what is in front of us.

But reading Genesis 1–3 again as the first day of reading the Bible chronologically, I found...

There is a strange thing that happens somewhere between childhood and adulthood.

At some point, a kid begins to realize the world is not as simple as they once believed.

People lie. Adults disappoint you. Friends leave. Families can be complicated. Suffering is real. Evil is real. Sometimes the good person does not win immediately, and sometimes the person doing something wrong genuinely believes they are doing the right thing. That realization is part of growing up.

But I think we make a...

I’ve been thinking about this Massachusetts abortion law probably more than I expected to.

On August 10, Massachusetts approved Chapter 188, changing the law surrounding abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Previously, the law listed specific circumstances for abortions after that point: situations involving the life or health of the mother and certain severe fetal diagnoses. The new law removes that list and says instead that:

“an abortion may be performed by a physician based upon the...

I did not spend years planning to become an author. Honestly, this whole thing started less than a year ago.

Last October, I was sick, out of school, and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with myself. For years, my life had been pointed in a completely different direction. I was studying molecular neuroscience. The plan was school, medicine, eventually medical school—the whole long road. Then illness interrupted it.

Suddenly, I wasn't going to class. I wasn't working. I wasn't...

Father’s Day was this past Sunday, and I didn’t get to post anything.

I’ll be honest, I almost let it pass. Not because I don’t care, but because sometimes these things sneak up on you. Then I remembered June is Men’s Health Month too, and it made me think about how we usually only talk about men’s health when it is officially “the month” for it, or when something bad happens.

That is kind of the problem.

A lot of guys are not walking around looking for a...