{"id":4275,"date":"2010-11-09T02:22:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T02:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=4275"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:36:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:36:27","slug":"day-2-the-year-of-living-biblically-give","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=4275","title":{"rendered":"Day 2 – The Year of Living Biblically (Give)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Day 2 (November 8, 2010): \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Today I gave away a book.\u00a0 “The Year of Living Biblically” by A.J. Jacobs.\u00a0 It’s a truly funny and fascinating book. Jacobs writes for Esquire<\/em> magazine and he likes to experiment on his own life and then write about the results.\u00a0 (Perhaps my decision to throw, give and sell stuff each day and to document the process was subconsciously inspired by Jacobs!)\u00a0 Jacobs, who started\u00a0his experiment\u00a0thoroughly secular (“I\u2019m officially Jewish but I\u2019m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant”), does his best to live a year of his life\u00a0taking the Bible literally.\u00a0 He even stones an adulterer – a septuagenarian adulterer – in Central Park… using pebbles. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bringing myself to give\u00a0away this book was harder than I thought it would be.\u00a0 You have to understand: I’m the type who\u00a0really doesn’t\u00a0even like to loan out books.\u00a0 They rarely come back!\u00a0 And I love my books.\u00a0 I underline little passages\u00a0for which\u00a0I’m just certain some day I’ll have a great need.\u00a0 But they take up a lot of space, they’re heavy and, when we leave\u00a0for the mission field,\u00a0I am not going to pay to store a\u00a0half ton\u00a0of paper somewhere, no matter what’s written on it.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I grabbed one book off my shelf this morning before I left for school.\u00a0 Sure, I could have taken it to Half Price Books and gotten a buck fifty for it, but it’s such a good book that I wanted to pass it on personally.\u00a0 I intended to give it to the 11th grade English teacher next door to me, but I got busy and forgot about it throughout the day.\u00a0 After school a former student stopped in my room.\u00a0 She’s something else – my nickname for her is “Satan”.\u00a0 But it’s a term of endearment.\u00a0 She’s made it clear that she does not care one bit for the church … I’m not real certain where she stands on the subject of God Almighty Himself, though.\u00a0 I offered her the book.\u00a0 She seemed suspicious, but she took it.\u00a0 I assured her it was not an explicitly “religious” book.\u00a0 (But I didn’t mention how Jacobs ends his year long experiment as what I would call a seeker – one who even attends Jewish services on a regular basis and finds solace in prayer!)\u00a0 I think she’ll read it.\u00a0 I hope we get to have a conversation about it some day…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Day 2 (November 8, 2010): \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Today I gave away a book.\u00a0 “The Year of Living Biblically” by A.J. Jacobs.\u00a0 It’s a truly funny and fascinating book. Jacobs writes for Esquire magazine and he likes to experiment on his own life and then write about the results.\u00a0 (Perhaps my decision to throw, give and sell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4276,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4275\/revisions\/4276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}