Reading the Bible on the commute

A commute is dead time. Twenty, thirty, forty minutes in which you can do almost nothing but wait.

Two decisions turn that time into reading.

The first is to download the text before leaving. Opening an app halfway through the trip, with bad signal, is enough to quit by the second day.

The second is to choose a short passage. A whole psalm fits in four minutes of attentive reading. A chapter of a gospel fits in eight.

Example: Psalm 121. You read “I lift up my eyes to the hills” and stop at verse 2. You mark it on your phone with a favourite or a quick note.

What does not work is trying to read on your phone with notifications arriving. Switch to airplane mode, or read from a folded paper in your wallet.

In Bibliou the text arrives on WhatsApp before you leave. It stays in the conversation to read when the bus starts moving.