Waiting for the question

 I have been reading a lot. Like a lot a lot. Like the most in my life a lot. That should be expected of me since I'm a PhD. So you'd expect that I'd be reading things like articles, books, novels, publications, drafts, newsletters, editorials, and all that fancy stuff to keep me afloat. But what about tweets and messages and emails and Bible verses and all that stuff that doesn't make it into the sent version of the messages, do those count as reading?

I'm thinking about this stuff because as a counter to reading I'm thinking about who I can talk to about my questions about my reading. I used to think that the answer was noone and that was a lonely place. What I feel now is a bit better, but it just takes some time and patience. A lot of time and a lot of patience. 

It's hard to explain what I'm saying so I'll try to give an example of what I'm trying to say. The old testament of the Bible talks about the period before Jesus came to the Earth. If you read it in order, it is pretty easy to read until you get to 1&2 Chronicles and 1&2 Kings. Then you're like didn't I just read this? Same with Jeremiah, Isaiah and many of the minor prophets. 

So reading it straight through without taking with as anyone (as I did) can be confusing and have your head spinning in circles and not knowing which questions to ask. At the same time I didn't want to sound naive/basic for making too basic of assumptions like was this the same dude we saw back 400 pages ago? That didn't seem possible. Honestly though, I was so confused about some of this stuff that I couldn't connect enough dots. I knew there was a Hezekiah and a Hezekiah, but not that they were the same with the same dad's name and same dad. And because I was so confused it didn't even occur to me to ask the question of relating it back to previous books. 

Sometimes this is my hardest part of the work in research or writing or thinking. I love to ask questions so I think that they will naturally come to me, or the ones I start with will inspire others. But I'm trying to teach myself patience. It's the thing I pray for the most. In this patience, I hope to be better able to gather my thoughts into well rounded questions.