A bit of a milestone – I finished the One Year Bible reading plan last night! I managed to stretch it out to 27 months but that’s alright. I started in January 2009 and initially kept the daily readings going till May of that year, when I feel hopelessly behind. I kept a mental note of the date and in May 2010 I started where I had left off. I kept reading regularly until the last week in December, when I was understandably distracted by the birth of our third son Gregory on 12/28. Knowing I wanted to keep the cycle going, I skipped that week and started again on January 1, 2011. It was only last night that I went back and finished up that last week – featuring Malachi and Revelations (which has the Lamb’s War metaphor so important to early Friends).
Thanks go to Gregg Kosela and AJ Schwanz for letting me know such a thing as one year Bible reading plans existed. I had never been able to stick to a regular Bible-reading regimen before. The grandmother who frequently declared me a Bible illiterate would be so proud! (Actually not, she’d find something else to critique, but her hangups around family and “Christian” living are a much longer blog post!).
It’s been great having a regular spiritual practice. I’m glad I can find my way around the Bible now and my understanding of Friends has deepened. The early Quaker writings are steeped in Biblical allusions and we miss a lot when we miss those references.
Martin, this is so great to read! Good for you! I’m glad to hear that you saw your Quaker beliefs deepen…if you ever get to write about any of the specifics around that, I’d love to read it.
(My new blog space is http://outofdoubt.wordpress.com)
Hi Gregg: Sweet, thanks. I knew you were somewhere.… I found the 2009 post from the new site and put the link into that. I didn’t realize it was Tall Skinny Kiwi that started that ball rolling – I’m a regular reader of his these days. It’s also funny to see he linked to Youversion.com, which is one of the readalong edition’s I’ve been using since they came out with an App on the Google Chrome store (the other is the paper copy I linked to before). There have probably been half a dozen posts inspired by the One Year Bible readings but I haven’t written anything more methodical about it vis-a-vis Quaker stuff. It would be good to do some day – but not right now. Kids finally in bed, time to reintroduce myself to the Mrs.
I’m working on the One Year Bible now. Thanks for your post. It is an inspiration to keep going. I’ve fallen a little behind