More than 1,500 years ago, in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Shmuel ben Nachmani said, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”6 He was right. If we hurry into the holy without preparing our hearts, we will see things not as they are but as we are. We will come to the Scriptures frenetically and functionally, projecting our own subconscious preconditions on the text, carrying with us whatever emotional and psychological baggage we happen to have accumulated that day.
