A chapter a day...

That's my read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year checklist, and all those boxes are checked! {Thank you, God, for giving me the perseverance to stick to it!}

It is so gratifying to be sitting at the end of this year knowing that I read every single word of God's Word this past year.  I love that.  I love His Word, and my time reading the Bible always expands my worship of Him.  I am so thankful.

I feel compelled to take more time this year for prayer, so I'm not committing to reading through the entire Bible again this year.  I want to grow in the discipline of prayer and of listening and responding  to God's Spirit.  I've been thinking so much lately about how easy it is to feed on God's Word and build our knowledge-- but how often God moves/leads *when we pray*... there are just so many examples in the NT of the disciples meeting and praying and knowing where to go and what to do and seeing God work and move *because* they prayed, and I want that, too.  I want to spend my days being led by His Spirit and doing His work.  This past year I spent way more time reading than praying, and I really missed that sweet intimacy with Him that comes from time spent in prayer. 

I am working on a plan for reading-- it will just be at a bit slower pace.  I've decided to scale back and read "a chapter a day" this year, which will allow for more time of focused prayer and also the freedom to dig in and study.  And- Mark is going to do my chapter-a-day plan with me.  Sort of as an afterthought, I asked Ella and Isaac (our able readers) if they wanted to do it, too.   Ella is very excited and agreed without hesitation.  (Her comment: "Then we can all read the same thing and talk about it!")  Isaac is still deciding.  He told me he's in the middle of reading the Psalms right now and isn't sure he's ready to commit to more reading. ;)  I know Isaias would like to, but he's not quite at that level of reading yet, so we'll just have to do a lot of narrating what we read to him so that he can participate in our conversations. 

Reading a chapter a day means that we will read through 11 books of the Bible this year.  These are the books I chose:

Joshua
1 Kings
2 Kings
Psalms 
Proverbs
Isaiah 
Zephaniah
John
1 Corinthians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians

That's exactly 366 chapters- out of 1189 total chapters in the Bible.  (At this rate it would take us a little over 3 years to read the entire Bible, but: one step at a time.  This is our goal for *this year*, and we'll see what next year holds.)   I've already promised to email a friend my chapter-a-day checklist, so if any of you are interested, just send me your email address and I'd be happy to email it to you, too.  :)