Five Reasons Grandparents Are Buying Three Copies Of The Same Bible

Reason 01

Giving Somebody A Bible Almost Never Works

Most people over sixty have given one at some point. A confirmation, a wedding, a grandchild leaving home. And most of them know roughly where that Bible ended up, which is a shelf.

It is nobody’s fault. A Bible handed over on its own is 1,600 pages and no instructions. The person receiving it has to decide where to begin, how much to read, what to do when the story stops and the law starts. Faced with that, almost everybody puts it somewhere respectful and means to come back to it.

Which is why the people who keep buying this one are not buying a Bible. They are buying something with the decisions already taken out of it.

Reason 02

A Date In The Corner Removes The Reason People Stop

Almost nobody abandons Bible reading because they stopped believing. They abandon it because one morning they could not remember where they were, and working it out felt like more than they had that day.

This one is arranged by date instead of by book. Open it to today and the day is already decided — a passage of Old Testament, a short reading from Psalms and Proverbs, a passage of New Testament. No bookmark. No plan to keep up with. Nothing to work out before the coffee has cooled.

About fifteen minutes. That is the difference between a gift somebody opens and a gift somebody uses.

Reason 03

Two People On The Same Page, In Two Different Houses

This is the part that seems to surprise people. Because every copy is arranged by date, two people reading it are on the same passage on the same morning without arranging anything.

A grandmother in one state and a granddaughter in another, both on the twelfth of March, both reading the same three passages. There is something to say on the phone that evening that is not the weather. Bible study groups have run on this for years for the same reason — nobody has to be told what to prepare.

A husband and wife working through it together at the same table. Three friends who all started in January. It stops being a private discipline and becomes something shared, which is most of what keeps anybody going.

Reason 04

Somebody Explains It On The Page Where They Read It

The real worry with giving a Bible to a younger person is not whether they open it. It is whether anything lands when they do. Reading and understanding are two different activities, and nobody is sitting beside them to say, this line here, this is the one.

So the page is marked while they read:

• ✱An asterisk beside a verse means that verse carries a biblical promise.
• ➤An arrow points to a life lesson on that same page, going deeper into what was just read.
• §Every few days, a longer article — how do I overcome anxiety, does it matter what I believe — matched to that day’s reading.

The notes are Dr. Charles Stanley’s. Decades of plain teaching, no theatrics, and they sit alongside the scripture rather than inside it — so a reader always knows which words are the Bible and which are a teacher’s.

Reason 05

It Is The One Thing You Can Hand Over That Keeps Working

Most of what gets passed down ends up in a box. This is one of the few things that has a job to do every morning for a year, and then another year after that.

People describe sixth years and second years. One woman reads it annually and her mother does as well. That is two generations on the same pages, which is not a small thing to have started.

And it is the reason the same buyers keep coming back for more copies. Not because anyone asked them to. Because the first one worked, and there are other people they would like to see get through it.