Assuming you want something different, spiritually speaking, and assuming you want some spiritual growth, what do you do? How do you get started?

The tools are not complicated. A hammer has been a hammer for how long? Two thousand years? Ten thousand?

I ‘d wager that if you picked up a hammer from a 5,000 BCE it wouldn’t look all that different from the one you could snag from Home Depot just down the road. It might be made of better quality materials, but it is essentially unchanged.

Sometimes tools don’t need to be the shiniest, and the most technologically advanced.

So here are some tools to help you move forward spiritually:

Know the story.

We are living in the middle (or, probably more accurately, the last act) of a great story, the bulk of which is found in the Bible.

So pick it up: pick it up and read it. Not for 2 hours a day, maybe not even for 30 minutes.

How about 10 minutes? Start there.

Every day.

What’s more, don’t just start reading randomly (or even from the beginning, necessarily). Instead, pick an approach, a PLAN for reading it.

(Two possibilities are: the one year chronological approach, where the story is told—as best we can determine—in chronological order; and also what’s known as the M’Cheyne reading plan, named for Scottish pastor Robert Murray M’Cheyne. The M’Cheyne takes you through the Old Testament once in a year, and both the Psalms and the New Testament twice.

Ten minutes a day is all that it would take to introduce this new practice into your life.

One additional thought: as you read, don’t get too bogged down in the details. Make notes of questions you might have, but focus on getting the “spine” of the story you are living in.