Our main goal here at Dive Collective is to make the Bible accessible. We want to equip you to study God’s Word on your own. Thankfully, we live in an era where access to printed copies of the Bible is available everywhere, often with just the touch of a button. We have a few favorites that we’ve been using around here, and we wanted to share them with you.

Bible versions. There are literally hundreds of them. As leaders of Dive Collective, we’ve been asked this type of question multiple times: Which versions do we use? Why? For what purpose? We wanted to address this topic with a basic overview of how Scripture is translated and some pros and cons of the various options.

In light of what’s been happening around our country in the past days and weeks, we felt the need to spend time in prayer and ask God to work in specific ways. As a Collective, we focused each day last week praying for our hearts and for people. We wanted to compile these passages and prayers into one space and invite you to continue with us in prayer—God’s Word is packed full of both examples of how to pray and testimonies of God’s faithfulness to answer the requests of His people, over and over again. And so, we’re choosing to end this series focused on that faithfulness:

“For the word of the Lord is right, and all His work is trustworthy. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the Lord’s unfailing love. We wait for the Lord; He is our help and shield. For our hearts rejoice in Him because we trust in His holy name. May Your faithful love rest on us, Lord, for we put our hope in You.” Psalms 33:4-5, 20-22

Father, we rest in You. We praise You for Your unfailing love. Thank you that You are trustworthy. Our hearts rejoice in You; our hope is in You and only You.

What is a story? We’re all capable of defining story, but just so we’re all on the same page here, a story, specifically a narrative, is a spoken or written account of connected events. We’ve all heard stories—in books, in movies, or told to us at the end of a school day in excessive, overlapping detail by nine-year-old little girls. But what defines a good story—what elements are necessary to make it interesting, readable, relatable? Well, it needs to consist of a few things: good characters—strong protagonists, complex antagonists, major characters, minor characters. They need to be connected to one another, or at least the story, in some way. There needs to be an overarching theme, a goal, a message that’s being conveyed. And absolutely, there must be a good Storyteller.

There is one Story that outshines all others. It’s actually the Story in which every other story finds its base, its root. It is the Story that defines all stories, because it’s written by the Creator of the universe, and all the other stories are able to be because of this one Story. This Story is made up of more characters than we could count, connected over thousands of years. It contains main plots and subplots. It includes histories of nations, one nation in particular. It’s full of heroic adventures and legendary figures. This Story, an Epic, starts out, “In the beginning, God created…”

I’ll never forget the morning I first discovered them. I was looking down, concentrating on a project I was working on. When I looked up and saw the spectacle, I wondered how on earth I hadn’t seen them before. I looked back and there wasn’t a single glowing flower to be found. I turned ahead again and saw them everywhere. I inspected the flowers closely and realized that the mountain behind me was covered in the same exact flowers, but I was standing between them and the light. Suddenly a Scripture I had been pondering came together like magnetized puzzle pieces and I understood: