Cal Hewitt

Catholic school through eighth grade, then a year at a Jesuit university.

I thought seriously about the seminary as an adult and did not go. That is the whole of my formal connection to any of this. It left me with a long familiarity with the book and the habit of reading it, and it did not leave me qualified to tell anybody what a passage means for their life.

More than it sounds like, because both start with the same problem.

Two decades of my career were spent as a business analyst, manager and consultant in banking and energy. The whole discipline comes down to one habit: somebody tells you what they want, and your job is to keep asking until you understand what they actually need, because those are usually different things. You do not build until you can say the objective out loud.

That is exactly the situation on a bad night. Somebody types I am exhausted, and the useful next question is which kind of exhausted, because a person worn down by caring for a parent needs a different page than a person whose work has gone flat. The site asks that question instead of guessing, and it tells you plainly when it does not have a good answer.

The other habit that came with the job is writing the decision down. In that work you never hand over a recommendation without the reasoning and the options you rejected, so somebody else can check your thinking and disagree with it. Every passage here carries the same thing: why it was chosen, and which other passages were considered and set aside. You are meant to be able to argue with it.

I read it properly before I write a word about it.

That means the whole passage in the book it belongs to, who was being spoken to and what about, what comes immediately before and after, and how the same words have been read differently over a long time. It is slow, which is why the written guides are arriving one at a time. I have done this kind of reading for thirty years across other subjects and written it up in plain language every time.

I will be straight with you about the limits. I have no degree in theology and no ordination, and I am not a pastor or a scholar. What I can do is put a passage back in the paragraph it came from, in the World English Bible, and stop there. Nothing here tells you what God is doing in your life, because I do not know that, and neither does a website.

I read every message that comes through the site.

If a note reads wrong to you, if a passage is missing its context, or if there is a topic you were looking for and did not find, send it through the contact page. Corrections are welcome, and I would rather hear about one than not.