Meaningfulness, or meaning-fullness, usually comes with more than 1 reading. You’ve got to read it at least twice.
The second time shows respect. The third time shows humility. With the fourth and fifth times, the tracings of beauty come into view, if beauty is there at all. But you can’t really know. Until the fourth or fifth time.
You can measure the character of a person -- or a culture -- by how he reads. If someone reads everything just once, that says something about what he actually knows, well, about what he actually doesn’t know.
So much for a culture that skims everything. A culture characterized by skimming ... ouch.
In undergraduate education these days, many students don’t read an assigned article even once. On the other hand, it is no accident that the students who really show promise are those who read the article at least once, and I suspect more than once.
The humbler students are usually the students who read things more than once.
Because the humbler ones come to know that words on paper are not the only things to be read more than once. The words of life circumstances must be read again and again for even the hope of comprehension.
The second time shows respect. The third time shows humility. With the fourth and fifth times, the tracings of beauty come into view, if beauty is there at all. But you can’t really know. Until the fourth or fifth time.
And blessed is the man whose life is founded on Words deserving more than five readings.
Logos2Go
Joshua 1.8 This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
Psalm 1.2 … but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.
Colossians 3.16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
Between 2 to 5 readings
Posted by
David Wang
May 8, 2009
1 comments:
This reminds me of James 1:22-25:
"Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does."
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