<\/p>\n
It took Don Ashley about 210 hours over eight months and 15 days to write his own handwritten copy of the New Testament.<\/p>\n
Ashley, a recently retired university administrator who relocated from Anchorage, Alaska, to farmland in Arkansas, posted on social media this month that he\u2019d just completed the project \u2014 an endeavor he said he began \u201con a whim\u201d on Jan. 5.<\/p>\n
But what started as an impulse quickly turned into what he called \u201ca mission.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn all these life transitions,\u201d he told CBN News, \u201cthis really served as an anchor for my soul.\u201d<\/p>\n
The idea, he explained, was born out of a work trip to the Society of Biblical Literature, a 146-year-old learning society dedicated to the academic study of the Bible and other ancient writings.<\/p>\n
When he was at the meeting in San Diego, Ashley saw a display of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of roughly 1,000 ancient Jewish manuscripts dating from the 3rd century B.C. to the 1st century A.D. They were discovered in the 1940s and 50s.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was so impressed by the artistry required \u2026 that I wanted to experience something about what the ancient scribes experienced,\u201d Ashley said.<\/p>\n
The average American spends about two-and-a-half hours per day on social media. For teenagers, that number is nearly doubled, spending roughly five hours every day on social media apps. And 41% of teens who reported the highest social media use rated their mental health as poor or very poor, according to data from the American Psychological Association.<\/p>\n
Much of that time is spent doomscrolling, a term that first broke into the American lexicon through Twitter in 2018 and was officially added to the dictionary in late 2020. The concept became pretty commonplace at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Americans of all ages were stuck at home spending an outsized portion of their days scrolling content on their phones.<\/p>\n
Doomscrolling, for the uninitiated, is the habit of spending excessive time online browsing through often negative, depressing, and alarming news content. Needless to say, dedicating a great deal of energy to that kind of content can quickly become distressing and take a significant toll on users\u2019 mental health \u2014 particularly if they have no belief in a sovereign God who promises to work together all things to the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28).<\/p>\n
As for Ashley, he felt handwriting the Bible was a better, more profitable use of his time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the idea that, instead of doomscrolling, maybe you could do something more useful with your time,\u201d he said. \u201cThe world is so fast-paced now, maybe it appeals to the idea of slowing down.\u201d<\/p>\n
The process was deeply cathartic for Ashley, who is currently recovering from a significant back surgery. He likened the project, in a spiritual sense, to \u201ca starving man being invited into a banquet.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI made mistakes on this page and I didn\u2019t worry too much about the mistakes,\u201d he said, holding up a page from his journal where he\u2019d marked over some errors. \u201cI just lined through them and kept going.\u201d<\/p>\n
When it was all said and done, Ashley noted that \u2014 while he didn\u2019t walk away with any new theological revelations \u2014 it was spiritually encouraging to physically experience Scripture in a new way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve experienced the Bible with my mind for my whole career and since my initial conversion experience in 1985,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I wanted to experience it with my fingers. Putting a pen to paper is a different experience than reading it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watch our full conversation with Ashley in the video above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It took Don Ashley about 210 hours over eight months and 15 days to write his own handwritten copy of the New Testament. Ashley, a recently retired university administrator who relocated from Anchorage, Alaska, to farmland in Arkansas, posted on social media this month that he\u2019d just completed the project \u2014 an endeavor he said<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32461,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[4257,5347,1987,10826,685,700,880,1211],"class_list":["post-32460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jesus","tag-anchor","tag-completes","tag-entire","tag-handwrite","tag-man","tag-mission","tag-soul","tag-testament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}