I'm Back!!!!
Did you miss me??? I missed myself! This summer has been even more busy than normal, mostly because we painted our living/dining/hallway AND had new carpet put in the entire house. Which meant we had to move EVERY. SINGLE. THING. Even the clothes in my closet on the rod had to move, because my rod is down low and the clothes touch the floor--which, of course, is carpet. Everything we owned was either carried down stairs into the basement, or smooshed into one of the two bathrooms or the kitchen. And when you live in a small ranch house built in 1963, trust me, those bathrooms and kitchen do not give you THAT much space to stack furniture!
But the badly needed carpet is now replaced, an most crucial things like beds are moved back up from the basement. The one million books that were moved down there--well--it may take a while to get all of those moved back up! It is pretty bad when both my husband and myself are teachers AND we are currently homeschooling. Translate that into "We have lots and lots of books, and neither one of us really helps the other get rid of books because we both love them!" ;) My husband likened this summer to "moving twice but not going anywhere!"
ANYWAY, I will share more about our moving things around in another post. For today, I really wanted to share something that I am starting TODAY. I saw this idea on-line, so it is not new with me, but starting today, August 1, there are almost 150 days left of this calendar year. To be exact, it is something like 152 or 153. And there are 150 chapters in the book of Psalms. So that means that today is a perfect day to start reading through the Psalms one chapter a day, and meditating on that chapter. And there are even a couple "extra" days in there for buffer if you find yourself not able to do your reading on a day for some reason. :)
Those of you who have been around this blog for a while will know that I LOVE LOVE LOVE doing the Bible in 90 Day program. I had never EVER been successful at reading my entire Bible through until I did it in a 90 Day schedule with an on-line group of people (which gave me incentive for sticking with it!). But at the same time, sometimes in your life you just really need to take God's Word slow and savor each little part of it. That is what reading the Psalms in 150 days will do--give me time to think. . .
So I started this morning--wanna join me???? I would love the company! And it's not so fast that you can't "catch up" if you do not read this post on exactly August 1. So I started with reading Psalm 1 this morning, and I underlined a couple verses with my colored pencils. I will explain my simple color coding that I use in a bit.
After I read the chapter, I looked for just ONE verse that seemed to especially speak to my heart. There is no right or wrong verse to choose--just whichever one touches your heart. Then write a couple thoughts about it. Again, there are no right or wrong things to write--this is for you, just for your own thinking about the verse a bit further. I choose for my one verse Psalm 1:2 and wrote it on my paper. This verse goes like this:
"But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night."
Then the thoughts that I had about it were as follows:
"His delight is in the law." God's law is not to be something that I try and get away from. Not something that I do because I HAVE to. It is to be my delight--and what I think about more than anything else. And what will be the result of delighting in God's law? Verse one--I will be blessed!
I would love it if some of you would like to join me in this slow, thoughtful journey through the book of Psalms. I am sure I won't be posting about it every day--homeschool is about to start, and I have much to do still to prepare for that! But I will try to post where I am and how it is going on a somewhat regular basis. Let me know in the comments if you are going to join me as well--it is always more fun doing things like this with friends! :D
And I promised to share a bit about my Bible marking system. I use a very very simple color coding as I read the Bible. Just four colors, and I do not mark every single time I read--just when I recognize something in my categories.
If I am reading a verse and I recognize that this verse is describing God's character, I will use my yellow pencil to color it. You can see in the sample picture above that if you take John 3:16, the part that is talking about how much God loved the world is telling us more about what God's character is like, so that part of the verse is yellow.
If I recognize a verse--or part of a verse--that is talking about what God's Will for me is, that gets colored blue.
And if I read something that is a promise from God for me, I color promises green.
That's it! Nice and simple! But sometimes there is something else that I want to highlight for some reason--maybe I want to study that out further, and it does not fit into one of the above categories, then it gets colored orange. I have enjoyed using these simple colors to help me really think about what verses are telling me.
So in Psalm 1 this morning, I highlighted verse 2 blue, because it is talking about what God's Will is for me--God wants me to delight in his law and meditate on His law day and night. I also highlighted verse 3 in green, because that verse is promising that when I do what verse 2 is instructing me to do, then I will be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, and I will bring forth fruit and shall not wither and whatever I do shall prosper.
So there you have it--my new simple Bible reading plan, and also my simple Bible marking system.
I hope you will join me in reading the Psalms!
~Susan
