I  started a project at the beginning of this year called Bible Pictures 365. I started making the pictures so I’d actually read the Bible.
That was the whole design. I’ve got a plan that takes you through the entire thing in a year, and I know myself well enough to know that a plan alone doesn’t do it. So I gave myself a job: one image per chapter, every chapter, posted. Miss the reading and there’s nothing to post, and the empty slot is the accountability.
It also solved something else. I wanted to see it. Not a painting somebody made in 1840 with everyone dressed like Europeans, but a guess at what the room actually looked like. Dirt, heat, the right kind of bread.
And I wanted it to reach somebody. That part was in the plan too — I’ve had a number in my head all year, a thousand people, and this was one of the ways I meant to get there. Two accounts started from zero, posting into the dark and hoping.
What I didn’t plan for was being graded.
Early on I did David and Goliath. Stone hits the giant in the head, giant goes down. In my version he falls backward, which is what you’d expect and what looks right on a screen.
The text says he fell on his face.
I have gotten, conservatively, twenty comments about it. Probably more. People still find that one and tell me.
The first few stung a little. Then I understood what I was actually looking at. Twenty people knew that verse well enough to notice the direction a man falls in a sentence most people skim. They didn’t scroll past a nice picture. They checked it against scripture and found it wanting, and then cared enough to say so.
That’s the whole thing working. I set out to build accountability for myself and accidentally handed it to a few thousand strangers.
The messages come from everywhere. Corrections, mostly kind. Questions about how I make them. People telling me a specific image landed on them in a way they wanted me to know about.
Somebody once asked me to make one on request. It’s the scene where an enemy commander runs from a battle, hides in a woman’s tent, falls asleep exhausted, and she drives a tent peg through his temple. That’s in there. That’s in the Bible.
I got it to where you understand exactly what happened and it’s still fit for a phone screen. I’m oddly proud of that one.
Judges gave me more trouble than I expected, and not the parts people assume.
What sat with me was how fast it repeats. Sodom gets destroyed, and not many pages later the same wickedness turns up in a town belonging to Benjamin, and it ends with a woman cut into pieces and sent across the country as a message. The tribes nearly wipe Benjamin off the map over it.
I couldn’t make an image for most of that, and I didn’t try. But I read it, which was the point. Every generation in that book thinks it’s different from the last one and none of them are.
Job was harder in a quieter way. You know from the start he didn’t do anything wrong — you’re told, the reader gets to see the ledger. Then you sit there for thirty-some chapters while his friends explain his sin to him. And Job holds up, and holds up, and then eventually gets a little too big for his britches and God has to take him apart.
The part I keep coming back to isn’t the suffering. It’s that his friends were the first ones to throw him under the bus.
Eight months in, I’ve changed almost nothing about how I do it.
Same format. Generate the scene, put music behind it, post it with the verse. It started as a six-second video because that’s what the app gave me, then it became ten seconds because that’s what the app gave me. Every choice in the process was made once, at the beginning, mostly by whatever was available that week.
I want to be honest about what that is and isn’t. It isn’t boredom. I still like doing it, most nights it takes me twenty or thirty minutes, and I’m not white-knuckling anything.
It’s that nothing has broken. The posts land a few hundred views, occasionally a thousand, and the number has been about the same for a long time. Which is exactly the condition where you don’t change anything — nothing hurts enough to make you.
If I started tomorrow I’d probably put myself on camera. Read the verse out loud, say what it did to me that morning. I’ve never once done that on those accounts. I don’t have a good reason.
I’m into August now. Still going.
When the year ends I don’t think I’ll shut it down — maybe it becomes one picture a day instead of one per chapter, whatever actually hit me that morning. I haven’t decided.
What I do know is that some man in another country is going to open his phone, look at a picture of Goliath, and check which way he fell.
David Willis 