A book that was once quoted over you as a sentence is hard to hold again. For some readers it was a verse preached to keep their ancestors in chains. For others it was a passage read to quiet a woman who tried to speak, or a line thrown across a table at someone for who they are. The pages can still carry the voice of the person who used them, and opening them can feel like letting that person win. That fear deserves to be taken seriously, not argued away, and it is not a sign of weak faith. It is what happens when a text has been held against your body.
Many readers do find a way back. The way back runs through honesty about the harm, never around it. The wound came from people who read the Bible for their own ends. The book still has to be allowed to speak for itself, slowly and in full, before anyone decides what it is. Dr. Esau McCaulley, a biblical scholar and Anglican priest, names the weight of this plainly. Every reader asks how to find God, he tells Lisa Fields, but for Black Christians there is another layer: "It's because the Bible has been used against us." Sherelle Ducksworth, who teaches hermeneutics and theology at Anderson University, describes the same weight from the inside. Long after she came to faith, she says, "I was always really afraid to read slave passages," because she dreaded arriving at a conclusion that would make chattel slavery acceptable.
What follows moves in three stages, and each one gives you something the one before could not. The first asks you to tell the truth about what happened and to tell the interpreter apart from the text. The second asks you to read whole passages instead of fragments, and to notice the difference between what Scripture reports and what it approves. The third asks you to test your own reading against the life of Jesus and to set a pace for returning that you can actually keep. You can work through it alone over several weeks or with a small group, and either way you set the pace.