A handwritten Bible for my kids
I've started a years-long project: writing out the entire Bible by hand, for my kids. No printing, no shortcuts, just a pen and a lot of pages.
This is as much for me as it is for them. Slowing down enough to write out every word of scripture keeps showing me things I'd have skimmed past reading it any other way.
His face shows up in every verse, once you stop to actually look.
When it's finished it will run to several volumes: something real, in my own hand, meant to be passed down for generations. Below is what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, and where I've gotten to.
Most mornings, before anyone else in the house is up, I make a protein smoothie, exercise, then sit down with the NKJV and start writing. Some days that's three verses. Other days it's half a chapter. No quota, I just keep going until it feels like enough.
I'm not here to relitigate translations. Every version carries tradeoffs baked into its source text and the era it was translated in.
I picked the NKJV for two reasons. The KJV has stood for centuries, essentially unchanged, but some of its word choices have drifted in meaning since the 1600s, occasionally to the point of meaning close to the opposite today. Reading it well means catching that drift, and I'm not confident I always would. The NKJV keeps the KJV's structure but modernizes the language enough to close most of that gap.
The bigger reason: the NKJV hasn't been revised in decades, and I don't expect it to be. What I write today will match the text as it stands, permanently. Translations like the NIV, CSB, NASB and ESV get revised on a rolling basis as English changes, which makes them moving targets. I'd rather write something durable than something that reads a little easier today and drifts under me over the next thirty years.
14 of 31,102 verses written, Genesis 1:14
Starting in Genesis, one verse at a time. This will take years. I update this number whenever I remember to.