As an avid reader, I thought this article by Trevin Wax was simply gold. But then again, he would have been preaching to the converted.
Here are some of the excerpts that resonated the most with me.
We live in an age of vanishing readers—a digital desert where sustained attention has evaporated and the next generation risks losing its imaginative inheritance. Sure, we read snippets here and there wherever we scroll online, and we dip into an occasional article or post on a sports page or in a political forum. But reading a book, going about it the old-fashioned way, where you give yourself over to a thoughtful and sustained argument that unfolds over several chapters, or where you lose yourself in a novel alive with beauty and subtlety—this practice appears less and less common for all ages, but especially the young.
Trends aren’t determinative. We make choices. We have agency. Which is why I refuse to bow to the fatalism that marks too many takes on the decline in reading—the insultingly low expectations of teachers and commentators who throw up their hands and surrender the next generation to the power of the cultural tides.
I want you to rebel. That’s right. In today’s world, reading is an act of holy insurgency. I want you to ignore the chatter of parents and professors who claim you’re no longer able or willing to exercise your mind through reading. I want you to swim upstream against the currents that make it easy to settle for superficiality.
No wonder so many people are competing for your mind space. The barrage of emails that flood your inbox, the clickbait headlines that startle you, the notifications that ping your phone, the apps and platforms that keep you scrolling or playing—they’re all designed to hook your heart. The landscape of your inner life is for sale.
Reading, especially when it’s challenging, is one way you rebel against all the corporations and influencers and platforms trampling the walls around the garden of your consciousness. Reading is setting a sentry at the gate, on guard against the horde of distracters intent on invading your mind space. Reading is clawing back your powers of attention so you can give yourself fully to the people in your life, so you can carefully weigh proposals and debates in society from multiple angles, so you can see today’s news through the lens of history and philosophy, so you can grow in wisdom and compassion, so you can savor the world’s greatest works of literature without the help of AI chatbot summaries.
Every time you power off your phone and pick up a book, you rebel. You haul yourself up onto a lifeboat in a sea of superficiality. You exercise your God-given mind and refuse to let your mental muscles atrophy. You defy the low expectations of those who say reading is a lost cause.
I want you to rebel for yourself. Drive a stake into the ground and tell the ever-encroaching attention vampires, “You will not colonize my mind.”
Importantly, as a Christian writer, Wax goes on to explain how this is also rebelling for the good of our soul.
Christians get called, rightly, “people of the Book.” God’s people meditate on God’s Word. And meditation goes deeper than reading. It means to sit, to ponder, to consider, to contemplate. The Bible calls for our gaze, not a glance. Reading is war in service of worship.
One of the biggest obstacles to this kind of Word-soaked life is the distraction of a digital age. We’ve lost the ability to experience the power of great poetry, or feel the weightiness of wonderful music, or stand and stare at a masterpiece of art. It’s often said, most works of art yield their secrets slowly. The same is true for God’s Word. The Bible makes demands of us. It calls for thought, for patience, and for devotion. The path to truly internalizing and digesting Scripture is rugged, intentionally so, for this is how the Spirit does his work in our lives.
To read and understand God’s Word is to mount an insurgency against the shallowness of an ever-scrolling word and to be rooted, like the tree that describes the righteous in Psalm 1—planted and fruit-bearing through delight in God’s law and meditation day and night. Reading can help you see, truly see, the glory of God. And the glory of God lights the way for you to truly see others.
In our world today, many voices seek our attention. Influencers everywhere hawk their wares. How tragic if we develop the capacity to attune to everything but the Word of the Lord. The most radical, countercultural practice we can cultivate today is an intensity in reading and listening to the Scriptures—a steadfast attention that refuses to allow anything to wrest our focus from the Bible.
Reading is the best way to rebel in a world that can glance at everything and gaze at nothing.
I would have ended the article with a slightly different choice of words: This world looks at everything and sees nothing. Read deeply, widely and thoughtfully – thus you will lead a quiet but confident revolution of sentient beings against those whose with glazed-over eyes.
And as always, a constant reading through the Bible is critical. Whether it’s Reading through the Bible in One Year, Two or Three, what matters is reading through it in its entirety regularly, not just snippets and verses and certain books alone. Our soul needs the whole Word, to live a whole life.
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