Dave Rosborough

We had a visitor at church today, a guy who had never been there before. When I was talking to him between services, he was telling us how much God had been doing for him and working in his life. Then he gave us a specific example – it turned out that last night he slept outside our local bank, under the awning, after getting ditched by some friends miles away from the shelter where he could have had a bed for the night. It got down to about -15°C last night (with the wind-chill), so it was a pretty serious situation. When he woke up this morning, he found himself covered in a blanket. If someone hadn’t put that blanket on him last night, he might just not have woke up, period.

I got reading a bit of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life this afternoon. Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, meaning that he belonged to a camp that “preached freedom from passion by following reason” (Wikipedia).

Seneca’s main point is that it’s pointless to complain about how short life is. Life, he says, is plenty long enough; the main problem is that we waste most of it. It’s a valid point, from my way of thinking at least. Seneca’s suggestion, of course, is that we’d do a lot better with things if we just spent all our time studying philosophy. As much as I like philosophy, I don’t think that’s the example Jesus would have us follow, however.

A couple of years ago at my school, our chaplain asked me to create a Bible reading plan that our students could follow from September to June, reading through the whole Bible in slightly less than 10 months. A quick search of the internet revealed that virtually every reading plan out there starts January 1st and ends on December 31st. Never one to back down from a challenge, I wrote an algorithm that generates a (roughly) balanced reading plan of an arbitrary length.

I decided that this might prove useful to others, since we don’t always decide to start reading the Bible on January 1st. So, I created a site, yourBibleReading.com, that allows you to set up your own Bible reading plan.