This post was featured in Joseph Nally’s blog last year.
When you open the front cover of a book, you symbolically open a door to your mind. You are letting the author of that book to enter your being and make changes there.
Reading is a form of transaction. You are giving the author—stranger, friend, or foe—a piece of your life, your time, and your thoughts. The author has the opportunity to make claims, explain them, and persuade you to think like he does. In exchange, he is offering you enlightenment, new knowledge, new line of thinking, or perhaps just an opportunity to exercise your brain and refine your thoughts.
Reading is a form of communion. But it is not like any other hangout session as we often have with our friends and acquaintances. Only those in our innermost circle get the license to hearing our deepest thoughts and convictions for an extended amount of time.
In reading, however, you and the author have access to each other’s deep convictions for hours at end. You can’t cut each other’s sentences or rebut thoughts instantly. The luxury of time allows you to understand the other side much more, if you let him finish his thoughts to the end of the book.
Reading changes you. Consciously or not, your mind changes slightly with every book you read. You may conform to the author’s ideas or reject them. In either case your mind will take a different shape than when you first began.
Which is why a Christian should take care when choosing his reading materials, for he may end up conforming to a shape contrary to what he intended. Because of the intimate communion that takes place in reading, the author will always imprint a certain character of himself to the reader.
Yet what better way it is to spend a piece of your life with the Book that contains the Word of life. The Bible, when read with awe and respect, opens up a communion with an Author who transcends matter, time, and space. It is a mind-to-mind communion with God, the Creator of the universe. Who better than Him to transform and change you? Whose ideas are better to agree with? And whose mind is better to mirror than God’s? Any other book, even a Christian one, must needs take a lesser rank.
Visit many good books, but live in the Bible. – Charles Spurgeon
