The Long Soak

Lingering With the Word

By Sandy Mayle

I grew up with the Bible. Stories of its heroes and heroines filled Sunday School and Bible School. My siblings and I heard children’s Bible stories at home, we attended an Awana-type program that encouraged memorization, we went to Christian summer camps, and I kept up the habit of personal devotions—all these activities got me into the Word.

I still remember that aha! season in my life when the Bible stories and characters and events began to line up and form one long, cohesive story in my mind: God’s plan of salvation, unfolding from Genesis to Revelation.

Since then, I’ve read through the Bible several times. (One slow, prayerful reading of the Amplified Bible, with its expanded text, took me four years!) I’ve used many versions and studied individual books, characters, and topics, both on my own and in group studies.

Yet as commendable as all that may sound, perhaps my richest experience with the Word occurred more recently, when God slowed everything down—way down.

Doctor’s Orders

Beset by a spiritual struggle that reached to the depths of my soul, feeling isolated, bewildered and grieving deeply, I needed help. And the Great Physician prescribed John 15:1–11.

This was Jesus’s “Abide” talk, a part of His long conversation with the disciples on the night before His death: “I am the true vine . . . Abide in me, and I in you . . . abide in my love . . . that your joy may be full” (NKJV).

Here, God was saying to me, are truths you need to step into and soak in for a long time. So, for nearly two months, I steeped in Jesus’s call to abide in Him.

Day after day, week after week, I read those eleven verses, praying and pondering His promises to those who abide, the consequences for those who don’t, and His role as the vine, His Father’s role as the vinedresser, and my role as the branch.