The readings - day 146 - Nehemiah 7
The thing is, when a census is released in Canada, I'm actually genuinely interested in the data. This time around, I was working on writing something up for my day job that allowed me to pore over the details with a nerdy, yet, useful/productive glee. I find it fascinating to look at the zoomed-out version of day-to-day life in Canada - who lives where, who left where, how many of whom stay where, etc.
See? I have nothing against the collection/publication of census data.
Census data collected and published from thousands of years ago in the ancient near-east, however...
It's not that I have anything against it, per se, but when I see that a day's readings consist of a single chapter, something says to me that that chapter is going to be fairly instructive, weighty or, at the very least, interesting.
This is not the case with Nehemiah 7. It's a(nother) seemingly endless string of names that hold (I'll be honest) no meaning for me whatsoever, and numbers attached to them.
It's there, though, so I read it, and somebody, somewhere, must have at some time thought it was important. I'm sure there are people even here and now that find Nehemiah 7 interesting, even exhilarating, for some reason or another.
And maybe that's enough.
There seems to be an undercurrent among a certain subsection of Christianity that says that we must always find the Bible inspiring/interesting/exciting/useful/etc. I've met a good many people who would cringe (or worse) if you dared to refer to the Bible (or any of its constituent books) boring/dull/drab/useless.
Maybe, though, it's not actually all that important to find all of it riveting all the time. Just like how I no longer hold any apprehension at all that anyone is obliged to read through the Bible front-to-back, maybe the idea of takings bits of it to heart while not really being moved by others isn't so bad, because somebody, somewhere may well find those bits that move you useless, boring and tedious...
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