From Brigham Young University's Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute podcast,

faith illuminating scholarship. In 2026, we are releasing a series called Old Testament Reflections.

Each week, a scholar offers a short reflection on the Come Follow Me reading.

Today's piece, Learning to sit with sacred discomfort,

reflections on Genesis chapter 18 through 23, is written and read by Katerina Paxman.

What do you do when reading the scriptures makes you uncomfortable?

Genesis 18 through 23 includes narratives that feel foreign to me, sometimes hard to engage. I sense they're heavily loaded with meaning, but I struggle to access it.

It's particularly uncomfortable to read about suffering and not fully understand it.

Often these stories become more approachable when I seek additional context, cultural, historical, literary, etc.

As a visiting fellow at the Maxwell Institute, I am currently blessed with colleagues just down the hall who can help me gain some of that context.

My home department is philosophy, where I mostly engage analytic texts and arguments that

aim for clarity and specificity of meaning. I can approach them like complicated math problems,

systematically, step by step, with confidence that

all the information needed to understand the argument is there. By contrast, ancient scripture

feels at least as dense with meaning between the lines as in the text itself. I appreciate the expertise of my colleagues as I try to learn some

of what God offers in the rich scriptural traditions of the Old Testament. But I also believe that

God intends to speak to us through the scriptures, whether we have access to expertise or not. There is one story in

this week's Come Follow Me that I do find fairly straightforward. The thing is, this story also

makes me uncomfortable. It is the Akita, the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

I am grateful for the interpretive tools I've been taught to apply to this story.

God never intended harm to come to Isaac.

Rather, Abraham needed this test of faith and obedience.

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