Category: Commentary

Easy Like Sunday Morning

“The Bible is worth all other books which have ever been printed.” Patrick Henry

 If I could offer one piece of advice to all of humanity, it would be this.  Read the Bible.  Read the entire Bible.  If you are a believer, then this is an obvious consideration.  If you are convinced that the God of the universe is real, and we have a book, accepted now for centuries as revelation of His existence and work, then you might want to read it.  Few Christians do this.  If you are a non-believer (atheist or agnostic, or perhaps have a different belief system), then I would challenge you to read the Bible anyway.  You might want to know more just in case this God and Jesus stuff is real.
 At this time of year, with many contemplating New Year’s resolutions, I would encourage you to read through the Bible.  Reading through the entire Bible might be considered a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be.  It can be easy – easy like Sunday morning.
 What follows is the Bulletproof Bible Reading method.  If you apply these suggestions, you will easily read through the Bible in one year, or less, guaranteed!
 Read the New Testament first.  Begin reading in the New Testament.  When finished with the New Testament, go on to the Old Testament.  This will allow you to get off to a solid start and gain momentum.  If you begin in the Old Testament, you may stall out in the harder books, like Leviticus or Numbers, and quit before Groundhog’s Day.  If time allows, after finishing the Old Testament, you might consider reading the New Testament again, for a full lap through the Bible and a heavy dose of the scripture.
 Read Monday through Friday.  Do your regular reading Monday – Friday and use weekends to catch up or read ahead.  This will give you some flexibility, without the stress of a rigid schedule.
 Count your pages.  Commit to reading a certain number of pages most days.  Decide when you want to finish your read-through and count the total number of pages you need to read.  Then do the math and determine how many pages you need to read each day to meet your goal (adjust this as needed).  Most people can easily get through the entire Bible in one year reading about 4 to 6 pages a day (approx. 20 minutes), five days a week.
 Make a habit of reading at a set time.  It will be easier to stay disciplined if you read at a designated time each day (e.g. – read before bed each night, or first thing when you wake up, or during your lunch break).  You might also read at other times to make faster progress but keep your daily scheduled time.
 Don’t stop reading.  When reading, if you have questions or want to better understand something, make a note, and come back to it later.  Don’t interrupt your regular reading.  Think of your reading as a foundation for all other Bible learning and do in-depth study at another time.
 Accountability is important.  To complete your reading successfully, you will need to be held accountable.  One easy way to do this is to email or text one or more of your slew foot friends on a regular basis to keep them posted on your progress.  Give them permission to hold you accountable.
 To make your reading more meaningful, learn something about the specific book you will be reading.  For example, before beginning the book of Matthew, read a commentary introduction or study outline of Matthew.  You can also watch YouTube videos that offer brief interesting Bible commentaries.  Taking a few minutes to learn more about the book you will be reading will greatly enhance your experience and help you better ingest, digest, and enjoy scripture.
 Use a TEXT Bible for your daily reading.  Do not use a study Bible for your read- through.  It will be easier to read pages without the extra notes found in a study Bible (text Bibles have no added notes or references).  These extras can be a distraction and slow your reading.  Also, a text Bible is thinner and much less intimidating to read through than a thick study Bible.  And do not read using a smart phone or other electronic device.  Using a real Bible (one that you can feel and hold in your hands) gives you a visual and tactile advantage, allowing you to see and feel your progress.  You can watch your bookmark move each day.  You lose that in an 

electronic format. A text Bible with large print and standard two-column format will enable you to read at a faster pace, helping maintain momentum.
Here’s another tip. Do not write in your reading Bible. Clean pages without markings or underlining will foster faster reading. Use a clean Bible for your read-through and write in your study Bible.
The Bulletproof Bible Reading method is not a plan. It is a simple way to read through your Bible. With most Bible reading plans, you have a schedule that plots your course. If you miss a day or more and fall behind schedule (and you will), you then have to go back and make up your reading when you begin again. This can be very discouraging (and when discouraged, many people quit). With the BBR method, you never really fall behind because you do not have a schedule. You simply keep moving forward every day that you read, without the guilt of falling behind. Keep in mind that you will need to spend approx. 1 ½ hours a week reading your Bible in order to finish within a year.
You are essentially reading your Bible as you would a novel, from beginning to end. Enjoy the Bible as you would any other fine literary work. Easy like Sunday morning.
© 2023 Jody Dyer

Danger Bowling & the Peanut Van

 “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

Kurt Vonnegut

 I have mentioned before in this column that in my formative years I attended a low-budget private school.  It was an interesting place to absorb an education, but while we were taught well, school could be sometimes dangerous.  It’s fun to remember.  And it is amusing to think that now my classmates, and all of us in that generation, are fully entrenched in all aspects of our society.  We grew up, got old, and started to run things.  It’s amazing we survived.  
 The 1970s were a different time, unusual in many ways.  But it was a good time to live and be in high school.  We had some of the best music – Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, Aretha and Stevie, Chicago, Elton and Eagles.  Sure, we had turbulence – Vietnam, Watergate, the big oil embargo, and the perilous administration of Jimmy Carter.  But overall, those were pretty good years, until we met John Travolta and disco took over.
 One recurring episode that I well remember from these high school days was bowling in P.E. class.  This story may offend the safety conscious sensibilities of some readers, but as I said before, the 70s were a different time.  
 Prior to the beginning of our bowling adventures, our school administrators, for some undisclosed reason, had made the decision to buy a large, used panel van.  Not a regular van, but one of those large, walk-in step vans, kind of like a UPS truck.  It was an old Chevy or GMC model from the late 50s or early 60s.  Under peeling white paint, you could read the faded letters on the side revealing that it had been a Tom’s Peanut delivery van in its former life.  We called it the Peanut Van.
 I was in a very small P.E. class at the time.  There were only seven or eight of us miscreants in this group.  We were a bit of a motley crew, and maybe not the students you would want to leave unsupervised.  
 On occasion, our teacher, Mr. King, needed a break.  I’m not sure what he did on these days off, maybe he just put his feet up with a bag of Cheetos in the breakroom, we were never sure.  But here is what would happen.  As we poured out of the locker room, clad only in our blue gym shorts and white tee shirts, running towards the basketball courts, Mr. King would casually toss the keys to the Peanut Van at one kid in our group and instruct us to go bowling…by ourselves.  He would send us, this group of 15 and 16-year-old boys, driving a beat-up used van, by ourselves in the big city (okay, pretty big town – we weren’t out in the country), to the bowling alley across town.  Most often, Dave Faulk was the driver.  I think he was 16 then and probably had his driver’s license.  He was fearless.  He drove a Corvair to school, those cars that Ralph Nader warned us about.  They were “unsafe at any speed” and would blow up and burn all the occupants alive inside if you hit anything.  You had to be brave to drive a Corvair (the entire Faulk family drove those cars).  
 At Mr. King’s command we piled in the Peanut Van and Dave would take the wheel.  We were off like drunken sailors on shore leave.  Dave was a good driver, but I can remember being thrown around quite a bit in the back of the van (no seats) as we weaved through traffic at high speed. 
 At the bowling alley, we needed $1.25.  You could bowl three games for a dollar.  Shoe rental cost 25 cents.  Sometimes we were able to score some nachos or chili fries, if any of the guys had extra money.  And the bowling was fun, especially unsupervised.  We had to keep score manually and use those small golf pencils.    
 All too soon our games were finished.  We headed back to school, racing through traffic to beat the bell.  We had nary an accident or issue during any of our bowling trips.  We were never pulled over by the police.  We never received a speeding ticket.  Pedestrians were avoided and no accidents reported.  I think we kept the sliding side doors open on these bowling runs, but none of us fell out of the van, not even once.  We all survived.  And school was fun.
 I still like to bowl…  

© 2024 Jody Dyer
typewriterweekly.com

 “It’s murder by numbers, one, two, three.  It’s as easy to learn as your ABC’s.”

Song by The Police

 Alex Campbell is a high school teacher in the small town of Elizabethton, Tennessee.  In the spring of 2018, he presented his Sociology class with an idea for a class project.  And it all began with an unsolved 40-year-old murder case and a potential serial killer that was never caught.  
 Proposing that they study sociological profiling through cold case murder, Mr. Campbell at first had the students focus on a young girl whose unidentified body had been found in their community in the early 1980s.  As teacher and students dug into the details of that initial case, they discovered a pattern of murders that had occurred predominately in the 1980s in Tennessee and neighboring states.  And the victims had one thing in common.  They all had red hair.
 To aid in their project, Mr. Campbell reached out to a friend and retired FBI agent.  He connected him with another agent whose specialty was behavioral analysis.  This agent was a criminal profiler, and his name was Scott Barker.  He gladly offered to help the class.  The students learned from him and got to work.
 They began by studying murderers, specifically serial killers.  Students learned how to identify related murders through the criminal’s M.O. (Modus Operandi – a criminal’s habitual way of operating), signature (unique patterns or behaviors used), time frame (when the crimes were committed), and geography (the locations of the crimes).  They found 14 redheaded victims whose bodies were discovered between 1978 and 1992 in six different states – Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.  Building a profile of the victims, it appeared six were connected.  Students began referring to them as the six sisters.  All were unidentified except for one.
 Students soon began gathering evidence and built a case file.  They poured over old newspaper articles, spoke with investigators, interviewed retired detectives, and began online sleuthing.  They held a press conference drawing attention to their efforts in an attempt to identify the victims.  The student’s work brought renewed interest from the public and law enforcement.  Over the course of the semester, the students were able to identify all six sisters.
 Students then began working on a profile of the killer.  Dubbing him the Bible Belt Strangler, they compiled a list of suspected attributes.  He was assumed to be a male Caucasian (serial killers statistically strike within their own race – all the victims were white), 5’ 9” to 6’ 2”, 180-270 lbs., raised in an unstable home with an absent father and domineering mother, right-handed, heterosexual, with an IQ above 100.  It was also determined that the killer was likely a truck driver because all the victims had been dumped along the interstate, most off of I-75 and I-40 in multiple states.
 As an interesting side note – in doing their research, the students discovered a change in trucking privacy regulations that they believed may have benefited their killer.  The Motor Carrier Act of 1980, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, deregulated the trucking industry.  It gave truckers more autonomy over the information they reported meaning routes and schedules were less monitored.
 Publicity in this case sparked renewed attention by law enforcement officials.  And the case broke wide open when overlooked DNA evidence from one of the victims identified her killer as Jerry Leon Johns, a Tennessee truck driver.  Mr. Campbell’s students had found the killer!  Amazingly he fit every one of the 17 points in the criminal profile the students had created. 
 Jerry Johns died in prison in 2015.  He had been incarcerated, serving a 73-year sentence for the assault and attempted murder of another woman in 1985.  Although yet unproven, it is believed that Jerry Johns is responsible for the murders of all the student’s six redheaded sisters.  
 As a continuation of their project, Mr. Campbell’s students compiled their findings and produced a ten-episode podcast entitled Murder 101.  It has been ranked in the top 10 crime podcasts for some time now.  You can find Murder 101 on Spotify, Audible, Apple, and more.  You can also listen to the podcast on YouTube.  It is a fascinating true crime story.  Rumor has it that a movie is soon to come.    

© 2024 Jody Dyer
typewriterweekly.com